Guest Tutors

Winnie M Li

Winnie M Li is an author and activist. Her latest novel Complicit was a New York Times’ Editors’ Choice, shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and listed among the Best Novels of 2022 by Grazia, Glamour, and The Irish Times.

Her debut Dark Chapter won The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize, was nominated for an Edgar Award, and translated into ten languages. She has recently adapted it for the screen. Driven by her own experience of rape, Winnie founded Clear Lines, the UK’s first festival addressing sexual assault and consent through the arts, and completed her PhD research at the London School of Economics on the emotional labour of rape survivors in the media. She is a recipient of grant funding from the Royal Society of Literature, Jerwood Arts, and the Arts Councils of England and Northern Ireland.

Winnie has given over 200 public talks and appeared on the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4, The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The Irish Times, BBC Women’s Hour, and TEDx London, among other media platforms.

She is an Associate Lecturer on the Goldsmiths, University of London Creative and Life Writing MA and holds an honorary doctorate of law from the National University of Ireland in recognition of her writing and activism.

M. J. Hyland

M. J. Hyland, author of the multi-award-winning-novels, How the Light Gets In, This is How, and Man Booker Prize-shortlisted, Carry Me Down.

Winner of both the Encore Award and the Hawthornden Prize, M. J. Hyland was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2006), twice shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, twice shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award, twice long-listed for the Orange Prize, long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC International Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the inaugural William Hazlitt Essay Prize, shortlisted for the Hazlitt Essay Prize (2013) and long-listed for the EFG Sunday Times Short Story Award and more.

Hyland has written for Granta, the Financial Times and the New Yorker, and is an experienced and enthusiastic workshop instructor who lectured in the creative writing programme at the University of Manchester (2007-2017), alongside writers such as Martin Amis, Colm Toibin and Jeanette Winterson. Hyland also reviews film and TV for the BBC and works as a freelance editor and mentor.

Andy Brown

ANDY BROWN’s recent novel, THE MIDNIGHT MECHANIC (Sea Crow, USA, 2024), is a vivid and faced-paced neo-Victorian novel about water, sewers, the dignity of work and family ties. His first novel was APPLES & PRAYERS (Dean Street, 2015), a story of Tudor rebellion. His short stories have been widely published in international journals. Bloomsbury publish his study of literary and artistic tree climbers, THE TREE CLIMBING CURE, and also his edited anthology of poems about medicine, A BODY OF WORK. Andy is also a celebrated poet, with 10 poetry collections, and is Professor of Creative & Critical Writing at Exeter University.

Damian Le Bas

Damian Le Bas is a writer, filmmaker and visual artist based in the UK. His critically acclaimed first book The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain won the Somerset Maugham Award, a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship and a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award. It was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and a Scotsman Book of the Year.

Damian is widely published as a journalist and poet, with bylines in Granta, The Literary Review, The Guardian, Tate Etc, Magma, Test Centre, Raw Vision, GQ and others. He has taught for Arvon, given guest lectures at various universities, and holds a First Class degree in Theology from the University of Oxford. In 2022 he was awarded an honorary Master of Education by the University of Chichester. Damian’s next book, The Drowned Places: Diving in Search of Atlantis, will be published by Chatto & Windus in March 2025.

Horatio Clare

Horatio Clare is a Welsh author known for travel, memoir, nature and children’s books. He worked at the BBC as a producer on Front Row (BBC Radio 4), Night Waves and The Verb (BBC Radio 3).

Clare has written memoirs such as Running for the Hills and Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope, a novella, The Prince’s Pen, and numerous works of travel and nature writing: these include A Single Swallow (2009) and Down to the Sea in Ships (2014).

He wrote and edited Sicily Through Writers’ Eyes in 2006. In 2015 he published Orison for A Curlew, a combination of travel and nature writing, and in the winter of 2017 Chatto and Windus published Icebreaker – A Voyage Far North, the record of a journey around the Bay of Bothnia with the Finnish government’s Icebreaker ‘Otso’.

His 2019 work The Light in the Dark: a winter journal is an exploration of the highs and lows of the British winter. Heavy Light: a Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing appeared in 2021, published by Chatto & Windus. The work describes Clare’s own breakdown, sectioning, psychiatric treatment, and recovery.

Two children’s books, Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot and a sequel Aubrey and the Terrible Ladybirds appeared in 2015 and 2017. Both Aubrey books were longlisted for the Carnegie Medal.