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.
Photo courtesy of Dave O’Carroll
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.
Photo courtesy of Chris Mann
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.
Photo courtesy of Tom Doig
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.
Photo courtesy of Caspar Swindells
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.
Photo courtesy of Ming Tang-Evans
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.
Photo courtesy of LSE
Louise Hegarty’s stories have appeared in Banshee, The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review and have been featured on BBC Radio 4.
She was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize and recently her story ‘Now, Voyager’ was produced as part of A City and A Garden, a new state-of-the-art sonic experience commissioned by Sounds from a Safe Harbour in association with Body & Soul and presented as part of Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh.
Her short story ‘Getting the Electric’, originally published in The Stinging Fly, has been optioned by Fíbín Media. Her debut novel, Fair Play, was published by Picador (UK) and Harper Books (US) in April 2025.
Kay Barron is Fashion Director at NET-A-PORTER. Kay moved from the Highlands of Scotland to London in 1998 to study Fashion Communication at Central Saint Martins. Following her graduation, she worked in Fashion Features for The Face and GRAZIA, before becoming Fashion Features Director of Harper’s Bazaar followed by PORTER Magazine. She presents much-loved NET-A-PORTER’s Style SOS and livestream series, and also co-hosts the NET-A-PORTER podcast series, Incredible Women.
Kay has written extensively for Vogue, The Gentlewoman, AnOther, The Times, Financial Times, and many more, while also consulting for international brands. With over twenty years working in fashion, Kay is passionate about the power of clothing, the beauty of a good fit, and the potential for great dressing to make or break your day.
Her first book, How To Wear Everything was published this year. It is a timeless and essential guide to dressing for everywhere and everything, which was bought by Michael Joseph in the UK following a heated auction.
Dr Elsa Panciroli is a Scottish palaeontologist and biologist, who studies the early origins and evolution of mammals. She is an Associate Researcher at National Museums Scotland, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and an EPA Cephalosporin Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford.
Her work centres on fossils she has helped discover during regular fieldwork on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. She has published scientific articles on subjects including mammals, reptiles, dinosaurs, fossil footprints, salamanders and the history of science, and has taught classes at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh on topics in evolutionary biology, zoology, palaeontology and scientific visualisation.
Elsa has written two books, both of which received praise in the press. Her debut, Beasts Before Us: The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution, (Bloomsbury Sigma, June 2021) was described in The New York Times as “smart, passionate and seditious”. Her “extraordinarily accessible and informative” second book, The Earth: A Biography of Life came out in 2022 (Quercus Greenfinch).
She is a graduate of the BBC Academy Expert Women training programme, and has appeared on radio, television and podcasts including BBC Crowdscience, The John Beatty Show, The Nine, and Our Lives. From 2016-2018 she was a regular paid contributor for the Guardian, and has also written articles for BBC Science Focus, Biological Sciences Review and The Scotsman, among other in-print and online magazines and journals.
She was a judge and co-organiser of the Hugh Miller Writing Competition, and co-edited an anthology of geological-themed writing, Conversations in Stone. She gives talks about science to people of all ages and backgrounds, including geological societies, schools and as an invited speaker at festivals, conferences and events, including New Scientist Live.
Her next book, Survival of the Unfittest, will be published by John Murray and Harper Wave in 2025.
