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 is the author of An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included) (Renegade, 2025), an exploration of food, language, identity and the Chinese diaspora, featured in Observer Food Monthly, The Sunday Times, AnOther and iPaper. She is the founder of Celestial Peach, a multidisciplinary platform established in 2018 to tell and connect stories of the Chinese diaspora through food, writing and community-led work. Through her events, writing and activism, Jenny has been featured by Gastro Obscura, It’s Nice That and Monocle. She has been listed three times as one of Code Hospitality’s 100 Most Influential Women in Hospitality.
Her food and culture writing has been published by Vittles and the South China Morning Post, and her chapter ‘The Community Centre’ appears in London Feeds Itself, the food writing anthology edited by Jonathan Nunn, alongside contributors including Claudia Roden, Ruby Tandoh and Jeremy Corbyn. Jenny has spoken at the British Library Food Season and the Edinburgh International Book Festival, lectured at SOAS, and taken part in panels and collaborations with the BFI, Southbank Centre, MilkTeaFilms and the Horniman Museum. She lives in London.
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.
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.
