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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, 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’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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Trevor holds a degree in English and an M.Phil. in Creative Writing from the University of South Wales, where he later lectured in Creative Writing. Since then, Trevor has participated at the Edinburgh Festival, Cambridge Festival, Red Line Book Festival and many more, and led Creative Writing masterclasses for Faber Academy, The Irish Writers’ Centre, Arvon and others. He was Writing Fellow at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and Artist in Residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. Trevor co-founded The Hyland Byrne Editing Firm with Booker-nominated author M.J. Hyland, and in his capacity as literary editor has worked on numerous well-reviewed published novels, and helped many writers at the start of their careers to achieve publication and success in prestigious writing competitions.
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.
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.
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