Ellen Banda-Aaku
Ellen Banda-Aaku was born in Woking Surrey in 1965. The middle child of three she grew up in Zambia and has lived and worked in Ghana, South Africa, the UK and Zambia.
In 2004 she won the Macmillan Writers’ Prize for Africa for Wandi’s Little Voice, a book for children. In 2007, her short story, Sozi’s Box, was the overall winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. Her novel "Patchwork," published 2011, won the Penguin Prize for African Writing.
She has a BA in Public Administration from the University of Zambia, an MA in Financial Management with Social Policy from Middlesex University and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. She’s currently is based in the UK where she lives with her two children Saada
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Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn
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HERE COMES THE SUN was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and received “Best Book of the Year” nods from NPR, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Entertainment Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, BuzzFeed, Vice, and Kirkus Reviews, among others. It was named one of the best books to read in summer 2016 by the New York Times, NPR, BBC, O, The Oprah Magazine, E -
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Born in Artvin, Turkey in 1950, he graduated from the Management Department of Boğaziçi University. He began work in the finance sector in 1974 and was chairman of Yapi Kredi Bank and executive board director of the YKY (Yapı Kredi Publications), where he amassed a personal library of 9,000 volumes and published works by Louise Glück and John Ashbery, before he retired in 2004 to pursue his full timewriting career.
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Gregory Maguire
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Colin Meloy
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Donna Leon has lived in Venice for over twenty-five years. She has worked as a lecturer in English Literature for the University of Maryland University College - Europe (UMUC-Europe) in Italy, then as a Professor from 1981 to 1999 at the american military base of Vicenza (Italy) and a writer.
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Aminatta Forna
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Laila Lalami
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Kelly Barnhill
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Kate Messner
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Kate lives with her family on Lake Champlain, where she loves to read, write, hike, swing on birch trees, and eat chocolate. She also hangs out in various places online.
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Born in Artvin, Turkey in 1950, he graduated from the Management Department of Boğaziçi University. He began work in the finance sector in 1974 and was chairman of Yapi Kredi Bank and executive board director of the YKY (Yapı Kredi Publications), where he amassed a personal library of 9,000 volumes and published works by Louise Glück and John Ashbery, before he retired in 2004 to pursue his full timewriting career.
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Dusti's books have won the Reading the West Award, the Sakura Medal, a Golden Kite Honor, the William Allen White Children's Book Award, and have been nominated for a Cybil and over fifty state awards. Her books are Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections and have been named best books of the year by the Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, Bank Street College of Education, A Mighty Girl, Shelf Awareness, and many more.
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J.J. Bola
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JJ Bola has successfully published two books of poetry Elevate and Daughter of the Sun (ebook). His third, and latest, is his most comprehensive poetry collection WORD, which -
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James Rebanks runs a family-owned farm in the Lake District in northern England. A graduate of Oxford University, James works as an expert advisor to UNESCO on sustainable tourism.
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Celia C. Pérez
Celia C. Pérez is the author of The First Rule of Punk, a 2018 Pura Belpré Author Honor Book. Celia is a longtime maker of zines inspired by her love of punk music and writing. Originally from Miami, Florida, Celia lives in Chicago with her family where she works as a community college librarian.
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Vaseem Khan
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Safiya Sinclair
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California.
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Shubhangi Swarup
Shubhangi Swarup is a journalist and educationist. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship for Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and has also won awards for gender sensitivity in feature writing. She lives in Mumbai.
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Priscilla Morris
Priscilla Morris is a British author of Cornish-Bosnian parentage, who lives in Monaghan, Ireland. She grew up in London, spending her childhood summers in Sarajevo. Black Butterflies, her debut novel, was inspired by family history and tells one woman's story of disintegration, loss, resilience and hope. When not writing, Priscilla teaches creative writing online and runs writing retreats in Catalonia. Find out more on www.priscillamorris.org
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***
I wrote my debut novel BLACK BUTTERFLIES (2022) to understand the siege that devastated Sarajevo from 1992-1996. It turned many of my maternal relatives, including my grandparents, into refugees. It's inspired by their stories and, in particular, by the extraordinary tale of my great-uncle, the Bosn -
Mirinae Lee
Mirinae Lee was born and grew up in Seoul. Her debut novel, '8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster,' has been longlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, and shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. '8 Lives' is inspired by Lee's great-aunt, one of the oldest women to escape alone from North Korea. Its translations continue to meet readers worldwide, including in the US, the UK, Italy, Denmark, Greece, Romania, South Korea, Spain, and Switzerland. She lives in Hong Kong with her husband and children.
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Reem Gaafar
Reem Gaafar is a Sudanese public health physician, researcher, writer and mother of three boys. She is published in both fiction and non-fiction circles, contributing to issues on public health and policy, society, racism and women’s rights. Her work has appeared in African Arguments, 500 Words Magazine, Teakisi Magazine, African Feminism, Andariya Magazine, International Health Policies and Health Systems Global.
Buy books on Amazon
Her short story Light of the Desert was published in the anthology I Know Two Sudans (Gipping Press, UK). Her second short short Finding Descartes was published in the anthology Relations: African and Diaspora Voices (HarperVia). Her debut novel A Mouth Full of Salt (Saqi Books, Invisible Books) won The Island Prize in 2023, was li -
Shubhangi Swarup
Shubhangi Swarup is a journalist and educationist. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship for Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and has also won awards for gender sensitivity in feature writing. She lives in Mumbai.
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Amit Majmudar
Amit Majmudar is the author of The Abundance, Partitions, chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best debut novels of 2011 and by Booklist as one of the year’s ten best works of historical fiction. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Best American Poetry 2011. A radiologist, he lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.
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