Emma Chapman is a British writer, currently living in North Yorkshire. She was born in 1985 and grew up near Manchester. She studied English Literature at Edinburgh University, and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.
Since leaving university, she has lived in London, Western Australia and Indonesia. In 2013, her first novel, How To Be A Good Wife, was published by Picador to critical acclaim, with reviews in The Guardian, The Financial Times, and The New York Times, amongst others. It was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was chosen as a Target Book Club title. It sold in nine territories. Hilary Mantel called it ‘an impressive debut from a writer who shows insight and power’.
Her second novel,The Last Photograph, about a British photojournalist’s experiences during the Vietnam War, was published in 2016, also by Picador.
Simon Parker is a British travel writer, author, filmmaker, public speaker and broadcast journalist; and has reported from over 100 countries in the past decade – from Bhutan and French Polynesia to Hawaii and Namibia, via Svalbard, Greenland and Saint Helena.
In 2016, he sailed and cycled from China to London in 133 days, for a Telegraph series and BBC World Service documentary. His award-winning TV travel series, Earth Cycle, has been distributed in 20+ countries globally and can be found on Amazon Prime, FOX Australia and YouTube.
His first book, Riding Out, (Summersdale, 2022) charts a 3,427 mile journey around “Pandemic Britain”, and his latest book, A Ride Across America (September, 2024) was published this July. Frustrated by the shallow headlines focusing only on Trump, guns and divisions, Simon decided that to better understand the USA he would have to travel across it, slowly.
Moso Sematlane is a writer and filmmaker based in Maseru, Lesotho. He has previously been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize as well as the Gerald Kraak Award. He won the Stinging Fly’s FBA Fiction Prize in 2024 for his short story A Fern Between Rocks. He is currently working on his first short story collection.
John Patrick McHugh is from Galway. His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Banshee, The Tangerine and Granta and been broadcast on BBC Radio3. He is the fiction editor for Banshee magazine. His debut collection of short stories, Pure Gold, was published by 4th Estate in 2021. His debut novel, Fun and Games, was published by 4th Estate in 2025.
Louis Hill is a writer and actor. As an actor, his credits include a wide variety of stage, screen and voiceover work. As a writer, he has written a number of plays and short films including his one-man show, Love & Tigers, which opened to sell out audiences and 5 star reviews for a limited run at the Hen and Chickens theatre. His short stories have been featured in a number of publications and have placed in several competitions. Let the Light in(DBF, 2025) is his debut novel.
Dean Browne is from County Tipperary; he currently lives in Cork. He was a recipient of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021, and his pamphlet, ‘Kitchens at Night’, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition, and published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. His poems have appeared widely in journals such as Banshee, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, PN Review, Stinging Fly, Winter Papers and elsewhere.
Laura Jean McKay is a writer based in Australia. She is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe 2020) – winner of the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award, The Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 2021. The Animals in That Country has been shortlisted for The Kitschies, The Stella Prize, The Readings Prize and the ASL Gold Medal and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc., 2013) and an Adjunct Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University, New Zealand. She was awarded the New Zealand Society of Authors Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022. Her latest collection is Gunflower(Scribe 2023), named one of Readings Best Books of 2023.
Zakia Sewell is a writer, broadcaster and DJ from London. For the past eight years she has been producing and presenting radio documentaries and podcasts for platforms such as BBC Radio 3 and 4, Tate and Camden Arts Centre, on race, identity, music, mental health and culture, and was the recipient of the silver award for ‘Best New Voice’ at the Audio Production Awards in 2021.
Zakia has written articles for publications such as Tate Etc, Resident Advisor and Weird Walk, and recently contributed an essay to This Woman’s Work (White Rabbit Books, 2022), a collection of essays by and about women in music edited by Sinead Gleeson and Kim Gordon.
Alongside her documentary and writing work, Zakia is a big music fan and collector. She hosts BBC Radio 6 Music’s Dream Time and DJs regularly at clubs and festivals in London and abroad. She also regularly hosts workshops and panels and has worked on several creative research projects with arts institutions and heritage sites such as Chiswick House, The Black Cultural Archives, The Stuart Hall Library and the George Padmore Institute.
In 2020 Zakia developed, presented and co-produced a highly acclaimed four-part BBC Radio 4 series called ‘My Albion’ which explored ideas of Britishness, folk culture, Empire and identity. She is expanding on these themes in her first book Finding Albion, which will be published by Hodder.
Jenny Lau founded Celestial Peach as a multidisciplinary platform to tell and connect stories about the Chinese diaspora. She has since built a grassroots East and South East Asian community through her food events and has been featured in media such as Waitrose Magazine, Gastro Obscura, It’s Nice That and South China Morning Post. In 2022, she was listed as one of Code Hospitality’s 100 Most Influential Women in Hospitality and was nominated for People’s Choice Person of the Year at the Be Inclusive Hospitality Spotlight Awards. Her food and culture articles have been published in Vittles and Cathay Pacific Discovery, and in September 2022 her chapter on ‘The Community Centre’ was published in London Feeds Itself (Open City), the food writing anthology edited by Jonathan Nunn, alongside voices such as Claudia Roden, Ruby Tandoh and Jeremy Corbyn.
She lives in London, and is currently working on her first book, An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included), published by Renegade in January 2025.
Tomila Lankina is Professor at the International Relations Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s and Balliol colleges).
She has worked on democracy and authoritarianism, mass protests and historical drivers of human capital and political regimes in Russia and other countries; she has also analysed the propaganda and disinformation campaigns in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine.
She is the author of three previous academic books. Her latest book The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class(Cambridge University Press; 2022), has in 2023 won the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association; and has received “Honorable Mention” for the Giovanni Sartori Book Award of the American Political Science Association Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. A short video on the book, which challenges the narratives of the Bolshevik Revolution as a great social watershed, can be found here.
Her first book for the general reader, To Live For Freedom: A History of Dissent in Russia, will be published by Penguin Press in the UK and Public Affairs in the US.
