Mena Abdullah was born in 1930 in Bundarra, NSW, and lives in Sydney. She attended Sydney Girls High, before training as an accountant and later becoming a Commonwealth officer, working for the CSIRO. She is a writer of poetry and short stories and was regularly published in The Bulletin, and other Australian journals including Quadrant and Hemisphere. Her first published poem was The Red Koran (1954) – included in Australian Poetry (1955). Her short story collection The Time of the Peacock was first published in 1965 by Angus & Robertson (Australia), andRead more
Greg Bear
Greg Bear is the author of more than thirty books, spanning thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy, including Blood Music, Eon, The Forge of God, Darwin’s Radio, and City at the End of Time. His most recent book is Take Back the Sky (Orbit, 2016), the last volume in his War Dogs Trilogy. Greg’s books have won numerous international prizes, been translated into twenty-two languages, and have sold millions of copies worldwide. He has served as a consultant for NASA, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of State, the International Food Protection Association,Read more
Jo Atherton
All the materials used in Jo Atherton’s work have been found on the tideline. In her weaving and printing, she is inspired by the stories these orphaned objects have to tell. Her work highlights the diversity of plastic items washing ashore and how the ubiquity of this material characterises the geological age of human influence – the Anthropocene. Jo has exhibited her work at a number of national and international venues including the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, London Luton AirportRead more
Ben Walter
Ben Walter is a writer of lyrical fiction and poetry who has been widely published in Australian journals, including Meanjin, Island, The Lifted Brow and Griffith Review. He has twice been shortlisted in the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes, and was the recent guest editor of Overland’s special anti-/dis-/un-Australian fiction issue. What fear was Where no farmers had ploughed the trees or settled seeds to graze the soil, where the folded arms of scrub bar gullies, where the wide buttongrass plains swelter under peaks ofRead more
Emily Midorikawa
Emily Midorikawa is the co-author of A Secret Sisterhood, a book about the literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontё, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, to be published in 2017 by Aurum Press (UK) and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (USA). With her co-author, Emma Claire Sweeney, she runs the female literary friendship blog, Something Rhymed. Emily teaches writing at City University London and New York University: London. She was the winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize in 2015. ClatterRead more
Laura Powell
Laura Powell is a commissioning editor at the Daily Telegraph and was previously a features writer at the Daily Mail. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard and women’s magazines. Her debut novel, The Unforgotten, was released in March 2016. She is the recipeint of a New Writer’s Bursary from Literature Wales and was named as one of Amazon’s Rising Stars. Laura was born in Wales and lives in London. Twp – If youRead more
Emma Claire Sweeney
Emma Claire Sweeney is a writer who has won Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund and Escalator Awards, and been shortlisted for several others, including the Asham, Wasafiri and Fish. Emma writes literary features and pieces on disability for publications including the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and The Times. She teaches creative writing at New York University and co-runs SomethingRhymed.com – a website on female literary friendship. Owl Song at Dawn, a novel inspired by her autistic sister, will be published by Legend Press in July 2016. A Secret Sisterhood: The HiddenRead more
William Shaw
The Sunday Mirror has called William Shaw’s new standalone novel The Birdwatcher, ‘a brilliantly constructed thriller, utterly compulsive’. His Breen and Tozer series, set in the 60s, was hailed by The New York Times as ‘an elegy for an entire alienated generation’. Before becoming a crime writer, William Shaw was an award-winning music journalist and the author of several non-fiction books, including Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood, about a year spent with the young men of South Central LosRead more
Andrea Bennett
Andrea Bennett came to writing fairly late. After her initial career choice of ‘artist’ fell by the way-side, she tried her hand at many things: translator, civil servant and charity manager to name a few. In the mid-noughties she gave up spending half her life commuting and began writing in her spare time. She started work on her first novel in 2012 – it was selected for publication by Borough Press via an open submission process. Galina Petrovna’s Three-Legged DogRead more
Andreas Loizou
Andreas Loizou is the founder of the Margate Bookie. He’s the major shareholder of kentrification.com, a website for artisan-made digital paperweights. Kentrification – I invented this word! It was the late 90s, some time between New Lad and New Millennium, and I’d invited a food critic down to the Old Town. A fancy French restaurant had opened that week. Pierre had brought his brigade and Michelin star to Gate-sur-la-mer. The first rumours of a new arts centre were bubbling up. KentrificationRead more
David Quantick
David Quantick is an Emmy-winning writer and broadcaster. He has written for many TV shows (Veep, The Thick Of It, Harry Hill’s TV Burp), for radio (The Blagger’s Guide, One, Broken Arts), and the comic That’s Because You’re A Robot. He is the author of the novels The Mule and Sparks, and How To Be A Writer is the sequel to the chart-topping writing guide, How To Write Everything. Heron – it keeps cropping up as a word andRead more
Salena Godden
Salena Godden is one of Britain’s foremost spoken word artists and poets. A regular performer at literary festivals in a career that is now entering its third decade, Salena tops the bill at literary events nationally and internationally. She’s appeared as a guest and writer for many BBC Radio programmes including The Verb, Saturday Live, Loose Ends and Fact To Fiction, and has written and presented several arts documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4. Burning Eye Books published her first fullRead more
David Young
David Young was born near Hull and lives in Twickenham. Before becoming a full-time author he spent more than 25 years as a news editor, with BBC World radio and TV. His debut novel Stasi Child – the first in a series of Cold War-era crime thrillers set in East Germany – was a Top 20 paperback bestseller, and is under option to Euston Films (Minder, The Sweeney) for a planned TV series. Crepuscular – Cats, in particular, areRead more
Sophia Tobin
Sophia Tobin was raised on the Isle of Thanet in Kent. Having graduated from the Open University, she moved to London to study History of Art, then worked for a Bond Street antique dealer for six years, specialising in silver and jewellery. Inspired by her research into a real eighteenth-century silversmith, Tobin began to write The Silversmith’s Wife, which was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize and published by Simon & Schuster in January 2014. Her second novel, TheRead more
Rosalind Wyatt
Rosalind Wyatt is a British artist who loves words. Initially trained in calligraphy, she went on to study textiles at the Royal College of Art. Her practice combines text and textile, and she works from her studio in London. Stitch commissions include luxury bespoke gifts for private and corporate clients from around the world, including two stitched garments for Fortnum & Mason of London, which now hang in their boardroom. She has developed her own technique of ‘writing with a needle’ combining textRead more
