Guest Tutors
M.J. Arlidge
M.J. Arlidge has worked in television for the last twenty years, specialising in high-end drama production, including prime-time crime serials Silent Witness, Torn, The Little House and, most recently, the hit ITV show Innocent. In 2015 his audiobook exclusive Six Degrees of Assassination was a number-one bestseller. His debut thriller, Eeny Meeny, was the UK’s bestselling crime debut of 2014 and has been followed by twelve more DI Helen Grace thrillers – almost all Sunday Times bestsellers.
Trevor Byrne
Trevor’s debut novel, Ghosts & Lightning, was published to international critical acclaim, and was selected as a Book of the Year in the Guardian and the Irish Times. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines, including Silver Threads of Hope and the Dublin Review (‘Mad For the Rain’, which was also shortlisted for the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Prize). His story ‘Go Down Sunday’ was shortlisted for the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award.
Sareeta Domingo
Sareeta Domingo is the author of The Three of Us (previously published as The Nearness of You), and creator, editor and contributing writer of romantic fiction anthology Who’s Loving You. Her novel If I Don’t Have You was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Awards 2021. She has also written numerous erotic short stories and an erotic novella with Pavilion Books. Her forthcoming novel Possibility will be published with Dialogue Books in 2025. She has written books for young adults under the name S.A. Domingo, including Love on the Main Stage, which was shortlisted for the Lancashire Book of the Year 2021.
She has contributed to publications including the i Paper, gal-dem, Black Ballad, Stylist and Token Magazine, and has taken part in events for Primadonna Festival, Winchester Writers’ Festival, Black Girls Book Club, and the Royal Society of Literature among others, and works as Editorial Director at Trapeze Books. She lives in Southeast London.
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.
Wendy Meddour
Professor Wendy O’Shea-Meddour is the Director of Creative Writing at Exeter University.
Brought up in Aberystwyth, she did a PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University before going on to teach English Literature at Oxford University for eight years. In 2012, her debut children’s book came second in the ‘Branford Boase Outstanding First Novel Award’ and Wendy has gone on to receive a wealth of international accolades including TIME Magazine’s ‘Best Ten Children’s Books of the Year’ and the US’s prestigious Margaret Wise Brown Prize for Children’s Literature.
With over 30 books published, many in over 20 languages, her latest stories have been read on CBeebies by Tom Hardy, Emily Watson and Louis Theroux.
Harriet Tyce
Harriet Tyce is the Sunday Times bestselling author of four novels, including the Neilsen Gold award-winning Blood Orange and her most recent novel A Lesson in Cruelty which received great critical acclaim. Her books are translated into nearly 30 languages. She’s a former criminal barrister who studied English Literature at Oxford University and has an MA in Creative Writing – Crime Fiction from UEA. She lives in north London with her family and two dogs.
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.
Tasha Coryell
Tasha Coryell lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. She holds an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in composition and rhetoric from the University of Alabama. Her first novel, Love Letters to a Serial Killer, was published by Orion in 2024.
Jennie Godfrey
Jennie Godfrey was raised in West Yorkshire and her debut novel, The List of Suspicious Things, is inspired by her childhood there in the 1970s. Jennie is from a mill-working family, but as the first of the generation born after the mills closed, she went to university and built a career in the corporate world. In 2020 she left and began to write. She is now a writer and part-time Waterstones bookseller and lives in the Somerset countryside.
Nick Hunt
Nick Hunt is the author of Red Smoking Mirror (Swift Press, 2021), an alternate history set in 16th-century Mexico, which was a finalist for the Edward Stanford Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place. His non-fiction books include Outlandish, Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water.
He has taught writing courses at the Arvon Foundation, the University of Bristol, Schumacher College and other institutions. He also works as an editor and a writing mentor. In September 2025 he will start a two-year placement as a Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Bristol.
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.
Louisa Adjoa Parker
Louisa Adjoa Parker is a writer and equity, diversity and inclusion consultant based in the Southwest. She draws on her lived experience of belonging to marginalised groups in her work. She is passionate about social justice, making the arts accessible to all, and telling underrepresented stories.
Martyn Waites
Martyn Waites was an actor before becoming a writer. He has been nominated for every major British crime fiction award and has written over twenty novels including the critically acclaimed Joe Donovan series, Born Under Punches which won the Grand Prix du Roman Etranger and The White Room which was a Guardian best book of the year. His next novel, The Other People, will be coming out in April, under the new name CB Everett.
Samuel Burr
Samuel Burr is a TV producer who has worked on popular factual shows including the BAFTA-nominated Secret Life of 4-Year-Olds. Samuel’s writing was selected for Penguin’s WriteNow scheme and in 2021 he graduated from the Faber Academy. A documentary he shot inside a retirement village when he was eighteen years old launched his career in television and inspired his internationally bestselling debut novel, The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, which has been translated into 18 foreign languages.
Tasha Dhanraj
Tasha Dhanraj is a multi-award-winning comedy writer with credits on shows such as Breeders, Bloods, Have I Got News For You, Horrible Histories, Shaun the Sheep and many more.
Aisha Hassan
Aisha Hassan has a Masters degree from the University of Oxford. She lives and works in London and has previously lived in Lahore. When the Fireflies Dance is her first novel.
Winnie M Li
Winnie M Li is the author of three novels. Her debut novel 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. Her follow-up Complicit was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. Her third novel, What We Left Unsaid, will be published in Summer 2025, alongside a new edition of Dark Chapter. Winnie holds a PhD from the London School of Economics in Media and Communications, and is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham
Alex Robbins
Alex Robins is an experienced playwright and game developer currently based in the South West. He has worked as a workshop leader for Theatre Royal Plymouth, With Flying Colours and the Barbican Theatre. Alex has been commissioned to write for theatre and video games, including ‘Fireworks’ (Arts Council Funded) which toured to London’s Vault Festival and ‘Mondays: A Sisyphean Typing Game’ which has been exhibited in Salzburg, Bavaria and New York. He received a distinction in MA Creative Writing from the University of Exeter and is currently writing a play in collaboration with a community group in California.
Cassie Werber
Cassie Werber is a novelist and journalist. Her first novel OPEN SEASON was published by Trapeze/Hachette in April 2024, and her second book is due out in 2026.
Cassie was senior reporter at Quartz, covering topics as diverse as workplace equity and climate change, and appearing on CNN, Sky News, the BBC, and NPR. She has written for the Guardian, Vogue, Red, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the i Paper, as well as other national and international publications. As co-founder of theatre company ChoppedLogic she co-wrote and performed in Paramour; wrote and directed The Runaround, and wrote and directed Double Negative, which reached the third round of Soho Theatre’s Verity Bargate award and was Time Out Critics’ Choice. Her screenplays ANMER and REWILD were both shortlisted for 4Screenwriting. She trained in journalism in Denmark, Amsterdam and at City University, London; in theatre at Central School of Speech and Drama; and in English Literature at Clare College, Cambridge.
Fiona Williams
Fiona Williams is a fiction writer and the author of the debut novel The House of Broken Bricks, which was the winner of the 2021 Bridport Prize, Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award and published in the UK by Faber in January 2024. She holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. Born and raised in South-East London, she now lives with her family in Exeter, where her writing focuses primarily on rurality and the relationships between identity, belonging, nature and landscape.
