Lynne Truss (born 1955, Kingston upon Thames) is an English writer and journalist, best known for her popular book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

Lynne Truss grew up in Petersham and was educated at Tiffin Girls’ Grammar School in Kingston. She gained a first-class honours degree at University College London in English Language and Literature.

After university in 1977, she joined the Radio Times as a sub-editor before moving in 1978 to the Times Higher Education Supplement as the deputy literary editor. She began freelance writing at the same time. Truss was Literary Editor of The Listener (1986–90) and was an arts and books reviewer for The Independent on Sunday before joining The Times in 1991, where first she spent six years writing television criticism, illustrated by John Minnion, followed by four years as a sports columnist. She won Columnist of the Year for her work for Woman's Journal. She now reviews books for The Sunday Times. Her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves (November 2003), about the misuse of punctuation, became a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. In 2005, she released a book on rudeness titled Talk to the Hand: the utter bloody rudeness of the world today (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door).

Michael J. Frayn (born 8 September 1933) is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy. His novels, such as Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, have also been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction. His works often raise philosophical questions in a humorous context. Frayn's wife is Claire Tomalin, the biographer and literary journalist.

Frayn was born to a deaf asbestos salesman in Mill Hill, a suburb of London, grew up in Ewell, Surrey, and was educated at Kingston Grammar School. Following two years of National Service, during which he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, Frayn read Moral Sciences (Philosophy) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating in 1957. He then worked as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian and The Observer, where he established a reputation as a satirist and comic writer, and began publishing his plays and novels.

Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989) was an English novelist, journalist, poet, and short-story writer.

Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. A satire and parody of the pessimistic ruralism of Thomas Hardy, his followers and especially Precious Bane by Mary Webb—the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it—Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite consciously modern, pragmatic, and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound, and dark rural scene those novelists tended to portray.

Gibbons was born in London, the only daughter and eldest of three children of Telford Gibbons and his wife Maude Phoebe Standish Williams, and grew up in Kentish Town where her father, a medical doctor, had his practice. She was initially home-educated, then attended the North London Collegiate School for Girls.

Gibbons's own family was suburban and middle-class, but in some of its psychological dimensions is said to have been "not dissimilar to the Starkadders" described in that novel.