Saraid de Silva is a fiction writer and a journalist based in Auckland.
Her work appears in A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2021). In 2021, Saraid won the inaugural Crystal Arts Trust Prize, the largest creative writing prize at any New Zealand University. She is working on her debut novel.
Photo courtesy of Julie Zhu
Simukai Chigudu teaches African politics and development studies at the University of Oxford. His academic monograph, The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship Zimbabwe (published by Cambridge University Press in 2020), won the prestigious Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award.
Originally from Zimbabwe, he moved to the UK to complete his secondary and university education. He has an eclectic professional and academic background, having studied African history and politics, public health and medicine. Before coming into academia, he worked in the NHS for three years. He is also one of the founding members of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford, and has become a leading voice in public debates on the cultural politics of colonialism and racism.
Simukai is currently writing his first book for the trade, When Will We Be Free? Living in the Shadow of Empire and the Struggle for Decolonisation, which will be published by The Bodley Head in 2024. This book will combine memoir, political history and cultural criticism to show how colonialism continues to shape politics, society and culture in Africa and in Britain and to explore what it really means to decolonise.
Photo courtesy of Binta Zahra Diop
Dr. Lexi Stadlen is a writer, anthropologist and ethnographer. With a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics, she spent two and a half years living in India, conducting research on the intimate lives of women. In 2019 she won the Bayly prize, awarded by the Royal Asiatic Society for an outstanding thesis on an Asian topic completed at a British university in the preceding year.
Her first book, Nine Paths, a narrative nonfiction account of the stories of nine women in an Indian village, was published by Chatto & Windus in April 2022. She is now based in Dubai with her husband and son.
Photo courtesy of Anna McCarthy
Amber Husain is a writer, editor and academic. She is the author of Replace Me, a book-length essay published by Peninsula Press in 2021. Her essays and criticism appear in Afterall, The Believer, the London Review of Books blog, LA Review of Books, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy and The White Review. Amber is currently working on a new non-fiction project.
Photo courtesy of Constance Meath-Baker
James Wythe is a food blogger and heath coach who taught himself to cook when he became seriously ill with M.E. and ended up being bed bound for two years. His recipes are simple, accessible and cater to all sorts of different health needs.
His first recipe book, Healthy Living James, sold to Headline at auction and was published in March 2022. Jam-packed with 80 easy, healthy recipes, this cookbook is for anyone who is suffering ill health, has food allergies, is totally new to cooking, or simply lacks time.
Each recipe is: gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, mainly plant-based (but it’s easy to add meat or fish), simple to follow, affordable and easy to adapt with ingredient swaps. With ideas for breakfast and brunch, on-the-go lunches, batch cooking, store cupboard meals and week-night dinners, there will be something for everyone.
Photo courtesy of Laura Bailey
Simon Lancaster is one of the world’s top speechwriters. He first started writing speeches for Cabinet Ministers in Tony Blair’s Government in the late 1990s and he’s since gone on to write speeches for some of the biggest business leaders in the world, including the CEOs of Unilever, InterContinental Hotels and HSBC.
He has written three best-selling books on communication including Speechwriting: The Expert Guide (Hale, 2010), Winning Minds: Secrets from the Language of Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and You Are Not Human: How Words Kill (Biteback, 2018). He lectures at Cambridge University, is an Executive Fellow of Henley Business School and his 2016 Speak Like A Leader TEDx talk has received almost 4 million views.
Photo courtesy of Jeppe Bjørn
K Patrick is a writer based in Glasgow. In 2021 they were shortlisted for The White Review Poetry and Short Story Prize, and in 2020 were runner-up in the Ivan Juritz Prize and the Laura Kinsella Fellowship. Their debut novel, MRS S, will be published by Fourth Estate (UK) in summer 2023.
Photo courtesy of Sean Patrick Campbell
Arthur der Weduwen is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue project. He is an expert on the history of the Netherlands and also writes more broadly on the history of publishing, news, libraries and politics. He is the author of five books, most recently The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2019) and The Library: A Fragile History (Profile / Basic Books, 2021), both co-written with Andrew Pettegree. Commended by the judges as “wonderfully absorbing and wide-ranging”, The Library was longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 2022.
Photo courtesy of Alan Richardson Photography
Fernando Cervantes is Reader in History at the University of Bristol, and has a special interest in the intellectual and religious history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. His previous works include The Devil in the New World, Spiritual Encounters and Angels, Demons and the New World.
Dr Cervantes was the John Coffin Memorial Lecturer in the History of Ideas at the University of London in 2005 and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, and the Liguria Study Centre for the Arts and the Humanities, Bogliasco, Italy.
His new book, Conquistadores: A New History, was published by Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK in 2020 and by Viking in the US in September 2021. It was named a Book Of The Year 2020 by The Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Tablet and The Lady. “Enlightening … Conquistadores makes for fascinating reading” — Jude Webber, Financial Times.
Clara Kumagai is from Canada, Japan and Ireland. Her fiction and non-fiction for children and adults has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Banshee, Room, The Kyoto Journal and Cicada, among others. Her short story, ‘A Girl Named Indigo’, was translated and published in Japanese as a picture book with the title Indigo wo sagashite (Shogakukan, 2020). She was a recipient of a We Need Diverse Books Mentorship (with Nicola Yoon) and a finalist for the 2020 Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award.
Her debut YA novel, Catfish Rolling (Zephyr, 2023), blends magical realism with Japanese myth in an original story about grief and memory. US rights have been sold to Abrams Children’s and Canadian rights to Penguin Teen Canada.
Clara is also developing an essay collection centred around multiracial identity, hybridity and belonging. She lives in Ireland.
