Lemn Sissay
Lemn Sissay OBE (born 21 May 1967), is a British author and broadcaster.
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Jim Wight
James Alexander Wight, son of the famous James Alfred “Alf” Wight who is best known as the author James Herriot . He took time out from the veterinary practice in Thirsk, where he worked with his father for many years, in order to write and then publicise his father's biography. He lives just outside Thirsk in North Yorkshire.
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Brian Bilston
Brian Bilston is a poet whose work has been shared widely on social media over the last few years. He has been described as the 'unofficial Poet Laureate of Twitter'.
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Jenny Valentish
Journalist Jenny Valentish is best known for her deep dives into the human psyche.
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The Introvert’s Guide to Leaving the House (Affirm Press) is a more introspective successor to Everything Harder Than Everyone Else (Black Inc), which explored the fine line between hedonism and endurance, and her mea culpa memoir Woman of Substances (Black Inc) which was nominated for a Walkley. She has also written a novel, Cherry Bomb (Allen and Unwin), about a DUI girl band, and co-edited an anthology called Your Mother Would Be Proud (Allen and Unwin).
She writes for the Guardian, the ABC and The Age, and teaches memoir and journalism as a guest lecturer at universities, for literary events, and through her own workshops.
Her preferred form of social medi -
David Harewood
David Harewood was born on December 8, 1965 in Birmingham, England. His parents are originally from Barbados in the Caribbean and they moved to England in the 50s and 60s. He grew up in Small Heath and is an avid Birmingham City FC fan. David is married and has two daughters.
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At 18 years old he began training as an actor at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He was the first black actor to play the title role in Othello – making history at the National Theatre in 1997. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed David a ‘Member of The Most Excellent Order’ of the British Empire for his services to acting in 2012, giving him the title David Harewood MBE. -
Richard Milward
Richard Milward was born in Middlesbrough in 1984. His debut novel, Apples, was published in 2007, and he recently passed his degree in Fine Art from Byam Shaw at Central St Martins in London. He currently lives in Middlesbrough.
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Essay on his writing: http://www.faber.co.uk/article/2009/2... -
Elaine Feeney
Elaine Feeney was born in the West of Ireland and lives in Athenry. She published her first chapbook, Indiscipline in 2007, and has since published three collections of poetry, Where’s Katie? (2010), The Radio Was Gospel (2014) and Rise (2017) with Salmon Publishing.
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Feeney’s work has been widely published and anthologised in Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland, The Irish Times, The Manchester Review, Stonecutter Journal and Coppernickel.
Her debut novel, As You Were, was published by Harvill Secker/ VINTAGE in August 2020. -
Simon Sharpe
Simon Sharpe is Director of Economics for the Climate Champions Team and a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute. He has published influential reports and created ground-breaking international projects in climate change risk assessment, economics, and diplomacy.
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He played a leading role in the UK’s Presidency of the COP26 climate change talks in 2020-21, as Deputy Director of the UK government’s COP26 Unit, where he created global campaigns that led to significant international agreements on ending coal power, moving to zero emission vehicles, and protecting forests. His other roles in government included leading international climate change strategy, establishing low-carbon growth as a priority in the UK’s industrial strategy, and -
Harry Baker
I have loved words from a young age and been a full-time poet since I graduated from Bristol with a maths degree in 2015. Most commonly this takes the form on standing on stages and sharing my words with others, but I am always looking to collaborate with new people and find new places to take it.
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I become the youngest ever Poetry World Slam Champion in 2012, and my first collection of poems The Sunshine Kid was published with Burning Eye in December 2014 - I am currently working on my second collection, as well as regularly giving workshops and performances and having fun touring around the UK as part of Harry And Chris. -
Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage, whose The Shout was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, has published ten volumes of poetry and has received numerous honors for his work. He was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 2019
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Armitage's poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on the north of England. He has produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize), both of which were published in July 2006. Many of Armitage's poems appear in the AQA (Assessment -
Kayo Chingonyi
Kayo Chingonyi is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry and the author of two pamphlets, Some Bright Elegance (Salt, 2012) and The Colour of James Brown’s Scream (Akashic, 2016). His first full-length collection, Kumukanda, was published in June 2017 by Chatto & Windus and went on to win the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. Kayo has been invited to read from his work at venues and events across the UK and internationally. He was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and has completed residencies with Kingston University, Cove Park, First Story, The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and Royal Holloway University of London in partnership with Counterpoints Arts. He was Associate Poet at
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Simon Wolstencroft
Simon Wolstencroft is a musician from Manchester, England, best known for playing drums with The Fall between 1986 and 1997.
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He was a member of The Patrol, an early incarnation of The Stone Roses with childhood friends Ian Brown and John Squire and was also the drummer for Freak Party which featured Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke. After leaving The Fall, he went on to reunite with Stone Roses singer Ian Brown, performing and co-writing on his Golden Greats album.
Simon's memoir You Can Drum But You Can't Hide is out now in paperback and e-book. Visit the publisher's website (Strata Books) to hear Si reading extracts from his book and other exclusives. -
Liz Berry
Liz Berry is an award-winning poet and author of the critically acclaimed collections Black Country (Chatto, 2014); The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto, 2018); The Dereliction (Hercules Editions, 2021) a collaboration with artist Tom Hicks; and most recently The Home Child (Chatto, 2023), a novel in verse. Liz’s work, described as “a sooty soaring hymn to her native West Midlands” (Guardian), celebrates the landscape, history and dialect of the region. Liz has received the Somerset Maugham Award, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The Writers' Prize and two Forward Prizes. Her poem ‘Homing’, a love poem for the language of the Black Country, is part of the GCSE English syllabus. Liz is a patron of Writing West Midlands and lives in Birmingham wi
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Sophia Thakur
Sophia Thakur has been performing since the age of sixteen and has a wide reach across social media. She has presented two TED Talks and has worked closely with young people, sharing her poems and the creative process. This is her first published collection. She lives in Middlesex, England.
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Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell, CC is a reknowned Canadian musician, songwriter, and painter.
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Tony Pike
Uncover the true story of Mr. Pikes, a hedonist at heart that went from a terrible upbringing to a dream life only a handful of people ever achieve.
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Dubbed the Hugh Hefner of Ibiza, Tony Pikes created a celebrity paradise, which was visited by the likes of Freddie Mercury, George Michael, Kylie Minogue, Julio Iglesias, and more.
Tony binged a 24-7 lifestyle of sex, drugs, and excess. Now, this legend of the Ibiza party scene recounts the ups and downs of his years in paradise. Throw in the odd ship-wreck or two, and readers will agree: This is more than just another great read… its perhaps the greatest hedonistic stories every told.
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“The incredible story of Tony Pike.”
The Independent
“Embodies Ibiza’s hedonistic excess an enjoyable mem -
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential and emotionally powerful authors of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she demonstrated literary talent from an early age, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. Her early life was shaped by the death of her father, Otto Plath, when she was eight years old, a trauma that would profoundly influence her later work.
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Plath attended Smith College, where she excelled academically but also struggled privately with depression. In 1953, she survived a suicide attempt, an experience she later fictionalized in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. After recovering, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study -
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth.
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Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not ap -
Katherine Dunn
Katherine Dunn was a novelist and boxing journalist who lived and worked in Oregon. She is the author of the three novels: Attic; Truck; and Geek Love. This, her most well-known work, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize for horror fiction. She also authored the essay collection One Ring Circus. She died in 2016.
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Kate Mosse
Kate Mosse is an international bestselling author with sales of more than five million copies in 42 languages. Her fiction includes the novels Labyrinth (2005), Sepulchre (2007), The Winter Ghosts (2009), and Citadel (2012), as well as an acclaimed collection of short stories, The Mistletoe Bride & Other Haunting Tales (2013). Kate’s new novel, The Taxidermist’s Daughter is out now.
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Kate is the Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize) and in June 2013, was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature. She lives in Sussex. -
Alan Bennett
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Alan Bennett is an English author and Tony Award-winning playwright. Bennett's first stage play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio plays followed, along with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose and broadcasting, and many appearances as an actor. Bennett's lugubrious yet expressive voice (which still bears a slight Leeds accent) and the sharp humour and evident humanity of his writing have made his readings of his own work (especially his autobiographical writing) very popular. His readings of the Winnie the Pooh stories are also widely enjoyed. -
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts.
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Blake's prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language". His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced." Although he only once travelled any further than a day's walk outside London over the course of his life, his creative vision engendered a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced 'imagination' as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".
Once considered mad for his i -
Mary Oliver
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information. -
Mike Gayle
I was born in the 70s — the 70s were great. I would recommend them to anyone.
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I was also born in Birmingham — in my humble opinion the greatest city in the world with the nicest people too.
I used to live in London — a great city too. But a bit on the pricey side.
I also used to live in Manchester — another great city (although technically I lived in Salford which is next door but that’s sort of splitting hairs).
Before I went to university I wanted to be a social worker — I have no idea why. It didn’t last long.
After I left university I wanted to write for the NME — I’ve always loved music but it was only when I went to uni that it started loving me back. I can’t play any instruments or sing so writing about music seemed to make sense.
My first -
Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo is the Anglo-Nigerian award-winning author of several books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora: past, present, real, imagined. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019. Her writing also spans short fiction, reviews, essays, drama and writing for BBC radio. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, London, and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She was made an MBE in 2009. As a literary activist for inclusion Bernardine has founded a number of successful initiatives, including Spread the Word writer development agency (1995-ongoing); the Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour (2007-2017) and the Brunel International African P
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Leila Aboulela
Leila Aboulela grew up in Khartoum, Sudan where she attended the Khartoum American School and Sister School. She graduated from Khartoum University in 1985 with a degree in Economics and was awarded her Masters degree in statistics from the London School of Economics. She lived for many years in Aberdeen where she wrote most of her works while looking after her family; she currently lives and lectures in Abu Dhabi.
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She was awarded the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000 for her short story The Museum and her novel The Translator was nominated for the Orange Prize in 2002, and was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times in 2006. -
Wendy Cope
Wendy Cope was educated at Farringtons School, Chislehurst, London and then, after finishing university at St Hilda's College, Oxford, she worked for 15 years as a primary school teacher in London.
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In 1981, she became Arts and Reviews editor for the Inner London Education Authority magazine, 'Contact'. Five years later she became a freelance writer and was a television critic for 'The Spectator magazine' until 1990.
Her first published work 'Across the City' was in a limited edition, published by the Priapus Press in 1980 and her first commercial book of poetry was 'Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis' in 1986. Since then she has published two further books of poetry and has edited various anthologies of comic verse.
In 1987 she received a Cholmond -
Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage, whose The Shout was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, has published ten volumes of poetry and has received numerous honors for his work. He was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 2019
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Armitage's poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on the north of England. He has produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize), both of which were published in July 2006. Many of Armitage's poems appear in the AQA (Assessment -
Malorie Blackman
An award-winning children's author, Malorie Blackman was honoured with an OBE in 2008. Her work has been adapted for TV and stage.
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More information available at:
Myspace
British Council: Contemporary Authors
British Council: Encompass Culture
Channel 4 Learning: Book Box -
Hans Fallada
Hans Fallada, born Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen in Greifswald, was one of the most famous German writers of the 20th century. His novel, Little Man, What Now? is generally considered his most famous work and is a classic of German literature. Fallada's pseudonym derives from a combination of characters found in the Grimm fairy tales: The protagonist of Lucky Hans and a horse named Falada in The Goose Girl.
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He was the child of a magistrate on his way to becoming a supreme court judge and a mother from a middle-class background, both of whom shared an enthusiasm for music and to a lesser extent, literature. Jenny Williams notes in her biography, More Lives than One that Fallada's father would often read aloud to his children the works authors i -
Kia Abdullah
Kia Abdullah is a bestselling author and travel writer. Her novels include Take It Back (a Guardian and Telegraph thriller of the year), Truth Be Told (shortlisted for a Diverse Book Award), Next Of Kin (longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award) and Those People Next Door (a Times Bestseller and Waterstones Thriller of the Month). Her new novel, What Happens in the Dark, is out now.
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Kia has won a Diverse Book Award (2022) and a JB Priestley Award for Writers of Promise (2020), and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Times, The Telegraph and the BBC. She is also the founder of Asian Booklist, a nonprofit that advocates for diversity in publishing.
Website: kiaabdullah.com
Twitter: @kiaabdullah
Instagram: @k -
Elaine Feeney
Elaine Feeney was born in the West of Ireland and lives in Athenry. She published her first chapbook, Indiscipline in 2007, and has since published three collections of poetry, Where’s Katie? (2010), The Radio Was Gospel (2014) and Rise (2017) with Salmon Publishing.
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Feeney’s work has been widely published and anthologised in Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland, The Irish Times, The Manchester Review, Stonecutter Journal and Coppernickel.
Her debut novel, As You Were, was published by Harvill Secker/ VINTAGE in August 2020. -
John Cooper Clarke
John Cooper Clarke (born 25 January 1949) is an English performance poet who first became famous during the punk rock era of the late 1970s when he became known as a "punk poet". He released several albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and continues to perform regularly.
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Susan Abulhawa
Also Susan Abulhawa
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(Arabic: سوزان أبو الهوى)
susan abulhawa was born to refugees of the 1967 war when Israel captured what remained of Palestine, including Jerusalem. She currently lives in Pennsylvania with her daughter. She is the founder and President of Playgrounds for Palestine, a children’s organization dedicated to upholding The Right to Play for Palestinian children. Her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, was an international bestseller, translated into 30 languages. Her second novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water, was likewise a bestseller, translated into 20 languages. The reach of her books and volume of her readership have made abulhawa one of the most widely read Arab authors in the world. Her latest novel, Against the Loveless Wo -
Hannah Kent
Hannah Kent's first novel, the international bestseller, Burial Rites (2013), was translated into 30 languages and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Guardian First Book Award. It won the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Indie Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year and the Victorian Premier's People's Choice Award, and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
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Hannah's second novel, The Good People was published in 2016 (ANZ) and 2017 (Feb, UK; Sept, North America). It was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year. It has been translated into 10 languages.
Hannah’s original feature fil -
Pádraig Ó Tuama
Pádraig Ó Tuama’s poetry and prose centre around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. His work has won acclaim in circles of poetry, politics, psychotherapy and conflict analysis. His formal qualifications (PhD, MTh and BA) cover creative writing, literary criticism and theology. Alongside this, he pursued vocational training in conflict analysis, specialising in groupwork.
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His published work is in the fields of poetry, anthology, essay, memoir, theology and conflict. A new volume of poetry — Kitchen Hymns — is forthcoming from CHEERIO in mid 2024.
Profiled in The New Yorker, Pádraig’s poems have been featured in Poetry Ireland Review, Academy of American Poets, Harvard Review, New England Review, Raidió Teilifís Éireann’s Poem -
Max Porter
Max Porter’s first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. It has been sold in twenty-nine territories. Complicité and Wayward’s production of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy opened in Dublin in March 2018. Max lives in Bath with his family.
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Matt Goodfellow
Matt Goodfellow was a primary school teacher for more than ten years before becoming a full-time poet and author. Shu Lin’s Grandpa is his first book with Candlewick Press. He lives with his wife and children in Manchester, England.
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Len Pennie
Len Pennie is a Scottish poet and Scots language and mental health advocate. She became known on social media in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland for her "Scots word of the day" and poem (Scots: poyum) videos. As of January 2024, her Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok accounts collectively number over 1.2 million followers worldwide.
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John Cooper Clarke
John Cooper Clarke (born 25 January 1949) is an English performance poet who first became famous during the punk rock era of the late 1970s when he became known as a "punk poet". He released several albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and continues to perform regularly.
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Nick Pettigrew
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Nick Pettigrew was an Anti-Social Behaviour Officer for over a decade. From bothersome neighbours with a fondness for crack cocaine and loud dance music to those being racially abused every day, Nick’s job involved keeping the community happy. Or at least away from each other’s throats.
He has a background in comedy and was was a standup comedian for several years, taking two successful shows to Edinburgh Festival Fringe. His comedy writing has been published by Shortlist and The Telegraph. He was a regular writer for The Daily Mash for over eight years. -
Mary Jean Chan
Mary Jean Chan is a Chinese-British poet, lecturer and editor. Her first poetry collection, Flèche, won the 2019 Costa Book Award in the Poetry category. She was also a recipient of the 2019 Eric Gregory Award for a collection by poets under the age of 30. Chan is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and co-editor of Oxford Poetry. She currently lives in London, and is Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University.
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Jodie Jackson
Jodie Jackson is an expert on the psychological impact of the news on our mental health and the health of our society. Her widely cited research has led to regular speaking engagements at media and mental health conferences around the world. Jodie Jackson is a partner at The Constructive Journalism Project and she holds a master’s degree in applied positive psychology.
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Andrés N. Ordorica
Andrés N. Ordorica is a queer Latinx writer based in Edinburgh. His writing seeks to illuminate love and loss while unpacking what it means to be from ni de aquí, ni de allá. He is the author of the poetry collection At Least This I Know and Holy Boys and the novel How We Named the Stars. He has been shortlisted for the Kavya Prize, Morley Lit Prize, Mo Siewcharran Prize and Saltire Society’s Poetry Book of The Year. In 2024, he was selected as one of The Observer’s 10 Best Debut Novelists. The following year he was named by The Skinny as one of 12 of Scotland’s Next Generation of Writers.
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Kevin Sampson
Kevin Sampson is the author of seven novels - Awaydays, Powder, Leisure, Outlaws, Clubland, Freshers and most recently, Stars are Stars - and a work of non-fiction, Extra Time. He lives and works in Liverpool.
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Kim Moore
Kim Moore lives in Barrow, Cumbria. She has a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University, and now works there as a Lecturer in Creative Writing.
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Her poems have been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. She regularly appears at festivals and events, her prize-winning pamphlet, If We Could Speak Like Wolves (Smith-Doorstop) was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and was shortlisted for other prizes. Moore won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010. In 2014 she won a Northern Promise award. She writes a thoughtful blog and has a wide social media following. The Art of Falling (Seren) is her debut collection. Her latest poetry collection All The Men I Never Married (Ser -
Len Pennie
Len Pennie is a Scottish poet and Scots language and mental health advocate. She became known on social media in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland for her "Scots word of the day" and poem (Scots: poyum) videos. As of January 2024, her Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok accounts collectively number over 1.2 million followers worldwide.
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Beryl Gilroy
Beryl Agatha Gilroy (née Answick) (30 August 1924 – 4 April 2001) was a novelist and teacher, and "one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants". Born in what was then British Guiana (now Guyana), she moved in the 1950s to the United Kingdom, where she became the first black headteacher in London. She was the mother of academic Paul Gilroy.
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Gilroy's creative writing began in childhood, as a teacher for children and then in the 1960s when she began writing what was later published by Peepal Tree Press as In Praise of Love and Children. Between 1970 and 1975 she wrote the pioneering children’s series Nippers, which contain probably the first reflection of the Black British presence in UK writing for children.
It was not until 1 -
Alys Conran
Alys Conran’s first novel Pigeon won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2017 and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize.
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Hannah Lowe
Hannah Lowe is one of a generation of younger poets whose work celebrates the multicultural life of London and its environs in the eighties and nineties. She writes with a strong sense of place, voice, and emotional subtlety.
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Lowe was born to an English mother and a Chinese/Jamaican father. She got her BA in American Literature at the University of Sussex, has a Masters degree in Refugee Studies, and is currently working towards a PhD in creative writing. -
Gil Scott-Heron
Gilbert Scott Heron was born in 1949. His mother was a librarian and his father a soccer player from Jamaica. In his youth Heron displayed both sporting prowess and academic ability (he won a place at Pennsylvania Lincoln University, like his role model Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance man). But he quit college after the first year to write his first novel, The Vulture (1970). While Heron was writing this the ferment of black politics and student radicalism was coming to a head, and his second novel The Nigger Factory (1972) reflects these developments.
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Heron has been more adventurous in his work as a musician and rapper. -
Decca Aitkenhead
DECCA AITKENHEAD is an award-winning journalist who conducts interviews with leading figures in public life for the Guardian. She lives in rural Kent with her two young sons.
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Penelope Bush
Penelope Bush trained and worked as a tapestry weaver, but always knew that one day she would write.
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She lives in West Sussex with her husband and son and elderly cat. She hides away in an old caravan to do her writing, where the only distraction is the occasional pheasant wandering past. Now and again, the family reclaim the caravan and it is towed down the coast to Dorset, where many happy hours are spent looking for fossils.