Keith A. Gessen (born January 9, 1975) is a Russian-born American novelist, journalist, and co-editor of n+1, a thrice-yearly magazine of literature, politics, and culture based in New York City.

Born Konstantin Gessen in Moscow, Soviet Union, he and his parents and sister moved to the United States in 1981. They settled in the Boston area, living in Brighton, Brookline and Newton, Massachusetts.

Gessen's mother was a literary critic and his father is a computer scientist now specializing in forensics. His sister is Masha Gessen. His maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches filed by foreign reporters such as Harrison Salisbury; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg Gessen, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine.

Gessen graduated from Harvard College, where his major was History and Literature^{[citation needed]}. Gessen completed the course work for his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Syracuse University in 2004 but did not receive a degree, having failed to submit "a final original work of fiction".

Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin (Russian: Владимир Георгиевич Сорокин) (born 7 August 1955 in Bykovo, Moscow Oblast) is a contemporary postmodern Russian writer and dramatist, one of the most popular in modern Russian literature.

Sorokin was born on 7 August 1955 in Bykovo, Moscow Oblast near Moscow. In 1972 he made his literary debut with a publication in the newspaper Za Kadry Neftyanikov (Russian: За кадры нефтяников, lit. For the petroleum industry manager). He studied at the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow and graduated in 1977 as an engineer.

After graduation he worked for one year for the magazine Change (Russian: Смена), before he had to leave due to his refusal to become a member of the Komsomol.

Throughout the 1970s, Sorokin participated in a number of art exhibitions and designed and illustrated nearly 50 books. Sorokin’s development as a writer took place amidst painters and writers of the Moscow underground scene of the 1980s. In 1985, six of Sorokin’s stories appeared in the Paris magazine A-Ya. In the same year, French publisher Syntaxe published his novel Ochered' (The Queue).

Lila Azam Zanganeh is a writer raised in Paris by exiled Iranian parents, currently living and working in New York. She is the author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness (Norton 2011).

Lila was born in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States to teach literature, cinema, and Romance languages at Harvard University. In 2002, she began contributing literary articles, interviews, and essays to a host of American and European publications, among which The New York Times, The Paris Review, Le Monde, and la Repubblica.

Her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, was published in the Spring of 2011 by W. W. Norton & Company in the United States, Penguin Books in the United Kingdom, L'Olivier in France, Contact in Holland, and L'Ancora del Mediterraneo in Italy. In 2012, it will be published by Duomo Ediciones in Spain, Alfaguara Objetiva in Brazil, and Shang Shu in China.

She is the recipient of the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, awarded each year by the Center for Fiction. She writes and lives in New York City, currently at work on a new novel titled The Orlando Inventions.

Marco Roth (born 1974) is co-founder and editor of n+1 magazine.

Roth is a graduate of The Dalton School and Columbia University, and is now a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Yale University. In 2009, he was awarded a Pew Fellowships in the Arts.

Roth is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, New School University in New York City.

His work has appeared in the Dissent,New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and the Nation. His memoir, Transmission, about his father's death and "truths and limitations in literature", is forthcoming.

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (Russian: А́нна Степа́новна Политко́вская; Ukrainian: Га́нна Степа́нівна Політко́вська; 30 August 1958 – 7 October 2006) was a Russian journalist, author, and human rights activist known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and then-President of Russia Vladimir Putin. On 7 October 2006 she was shot and killed in the lift of her block of flats, an unsolved assassination that continues to attract international attention.

Politkovskaya made her reputation reporting from Chechnya. Her post-1999 articles about conditions in Chechnya were turned into several books; Russian readers' main access to her investigations and publications was through Novaya gazeta, a Russian newspaper known for its often-critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. From 2000 onwards, she received numerous international awards for her work. In 2004, she published a personal account: Putin's Russia.

Politkovskaya was born Anna Mazepa in New York City in 1958. Her parents, diplomats at the United Nations, were Ukrainian. Politkovskaya grew up in Moscow; she graduated from Moscow State University's school of journalism in 1980. While there, she defended a thesis about the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva and married fellow student Alexander Politkovsky. They had two children, Vera and Ilya. At first Alexander was better known, joining TV journalist Vladislav Listyev as one of the hosts on the late-night TV programme Vzglyad. Apart from her childhood years, Politkovskaya spent no more than a few weeks outside of Russia at any one time, even when her life came under threat. She acquired a US passport, but never relinquished her Russian citizenship.