Eileen Pollard is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester. Her interview with Hilary Mantel was published by Textual Practice in 2015 and she is co-editor of the forthcoming collection of essays Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Berthold Schoene is Professor of English and Faculty Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange for Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University. His books include The Making of Orcadia (1995), Writing Men (2000), Posting the Male (2003), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (2007), The Cosmopolitan Novel (2009) and The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh (2010). He has co-edited special journal issues on 'Texting Obama: Politics, Poetics, Popular Culture' for Comparative American Studies (2012) and 'Cosmopolitanism as Critical and Creative Practice' for the Open University's Open Arts Journal (2013).