Paul Auster is the best-selling author of The New York Trilogy ,Invisible, Moon Palace, The Brooklyn Follies, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Medicis Etranger for Leviathan. He has also been short-listed for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ( The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction ( The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
J.M. Coetzee is one of the foremost writers of South Africa, and, as the 2003 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, of the world. His many books include Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, and Disgrace. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, for Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace.