Courttia Newland is the author of seven books including his much lauded debut, The Scholar. His latest novel, The Gospel According to Cane, was published in 2013. His short stories have appeared in many anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2016 he was awarded the Tayner Barbers Award for science fiction writing and the Roland Rees Busary for playwriting. As a screenwriter, he has written two episodes of the Steve McQueen BBC series Small Axe.

Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother, who was a foster carer and a Caribbean father. She worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law, was a magistrate for several years and sits on adoption panels.

She used to advise Social Services on the care of foster children, and has written training manuals on adoption and foster care.

Her writing has received numerous awards including the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2014 and 2015 and the SI Leeds Literary Reader's Choice Prize 2014. My Name is Leon is her first novel. She has two children.

Sara Maitland is the British author of numerous works of fiction, including the Somerset Maugham Award-winning Daughter of Jersualem, and several non-fiction books, including A Book of Silence.

Born in 1950, she studied at Oxford University and lives in Galloway, Scotland. 

Stuart Evers’ debut, Ten Stories About Smoking, won the London Book Award in 2011; his highly acclaimed novel, If This is Home, followed in 2012 and his collection Your Father Sends His Love, was shortlisted for the 2016 Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

In 2017, Evers won the Eccles British Library Writer’s Award – one of Europe’s richest prizes for a work in progress. His work has appeared in three editions of the Best British Short Stories, as well as Granta, the White Review, Prospect and on Radio 4. Originally from the North West, he lives in London.

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize.

Her short story 'The Not-Dead and the Saved' won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize.

Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize.

Maggie Gee has written 15 books to great acclaim including The White Family and Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, and her work has been translated into 14 languages.

In 2012 there was an international conference about her work at St Andrew’s University. One of Granta’s original ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been shortlisted for global prizes including the Orange (now Women’s) Prize, and the Dublin International IMPAC Prize.

She writes novels, short stories, memoir, poetry and journalism, is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, a Director of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society and a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. Maggie Gee was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2012. She lives in London WC1, and Ramsgate, Kent.

Born in Liverpool, the only child of Communist parents, Alexei moved to London in 1971 to attend Chelsea Art School.

He became the first MC of the Comedy Store and later the Comic Strip. After years of stand-up, television, sitcoms, films and even a hit single, he published his first highly acclaimed collection of short stories.

Barcelona Plates was followed by The Dog Catcher, two novels: Overtaken and The Weeping Women Hotel and a novella, Mister Roberts. The first volume of Alexei's memoirs was Stalin Ate My Homework.

Joanna Quinn was born in London and grew up in Dorset, in the southwest of England, where her debut novel, The Whalebone Theatre, is set.

Joanna has worked in journalism and the charity sector. She is also a short-story writer, published by The White Review and Comma Press, among others. She teaches creative writing and lives in a village near the sea in Dorset.