MSt in Creative Writing: Meet the team

Clare Morgan is a fiction writer, literary critic, and founder of the MSt in Creative Writing. Her novel, A Book for All and None (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best Novel award and her short fiction has been widely anthologized, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her research on the relation between poetry and business has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company, and in Humanizing Business (Springer, 2022). Her book, What Poetry Brings to Business, was published by University of Michigan Press. Clare is a member of Oxford University’s English Faculty and Director of the Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing. Her latest collection of short stories, Scar Tissue, was published in 2022, alongside a republication of her earlier collection, An Affair of the Heart.

Mary Jean Chan is Departmental Lecturer in Poetry at Oxford Lifelong Learning. Chan is the author of the poetry collection Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019) and Faber USA (2020). Flèche won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for multiple prizes, including the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize. Chan's second book, Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), was a Guardian Best Poetry Book of 2023 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Writers' Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Chan co-edited the acclaimed anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan. In 2023, Chan served as a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize. A 2023-24 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Chan is a Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford.  

Kate Longworth is a Departmental Lecturer in Drama at Oxford Lifelong Learning and works in the field of modern literary and intellectual history, with a particular focus on English theatre and drama. She is concerned with late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and intellectual history, as well as modern print culture and the history of the book. Her forthcoming monograph, currently under development with Oxford University Press, places the story of the modern English poetic drama in a broader history of ideas. That book takes the story from 1897 to 1928, and a follow-up volume will take it through to 1956. Kate has worked as Senior Editor for Oberon Books, recently bought by Bloomsbury. She has judged new writing competitions, arranging for publication and agent representation where possible. Kate is care-experienced and currently writing about the history of fostering and adoption in England.  

Barney Norris is a Departmental Lecturer in Fiction at Oxford Lifelong Learning. His work has received awards from the International Theatre Institute, the Critics’ Circle, the Evening Standard, the South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Awards, the Hawthornden Literature Foundation and the Royal Society of Literature, among others, and has been translated into ten languages. His plays include VISITORS, EVENTIDE, NIGHTFALL, THE BAND BACK TOGETHER and SECOND BEST, as well as acclaimed adaptations of Ishiguro and Lorca; his radio plays include THE QUEEN OF THE ISLE OF WIGHT, and his novels include UNDERCURRENT and FIVE RIVERS MET ON A WOODED PLAIN. He is presently developing a range of projects for theatre and film and working on his fifth novel. 

Lucy Atkins is a British feature journalist, Sunday Times book critic and the award-winning author of five novels and several non-fiction titles. Her debut novel, The Missing One (Quercus 2014), was a UK bestseller, and The Night Visitor (Quercus 2017) has been optioned for television. Her latest novel, Magpie Lane (Quercus 2020), was a Book of the Year pick for the Guardian, Telegraph, Good Housekeeping and BBC Radio 4’s Open Book. Lucy has judged the Costa Book Awards and written features or reviews for most UK broadsheets. Her newest novel, Windmill Hill, was published in 2023.  

Wendy Brandmark is a novelist and short story writer. Her collection of short stories, He Runs the Moon: Tales from the Cities, was longlisted for the 2017 Edgehill Short Story Prize. She won first prize for the short story in The Bridport Prize in 2016. Her short stories have appeared in journals including Riptide Journal, North American Review, The Massachusetts Review, Stand and Prism International. Her last novel, The Stray American, was longlisted for the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She has had writing residencies at the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Germany, the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, and was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. Her fiction reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Literary Review and the Independent. She is a former director of the creative writing programme at Birkbeck College’s Faculty of Continuing Education. She now teaches fiction writing at the City Lit. She is currently working on a short story collection. 

Ben Brown read Law at Worcester College and taught at Brasenose and Balliol before his first two plays were produced by Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre. His most recent play, The End of the Night, was produced at Park Theatre in May 2022 and is now online at originaltheatreonline.com. His other plays include Four Letter Word (Edinburgh Fringe, Cameron Mackintosh New Writing Ward), All Things Considered (Hampstead Theatre and productions in Paris, Heidelberg and Sydney), Larkin With Women (TMA Best New Play and Express Play of the Year), The Promise (Orange Tree Theatre), Three Days in May (national tour and West End, Whatsonstage Best New Play Award and, translated as 3 Dias En Mayo, Mexican Theatre Critics Best Play Award) and A Splinter of Ice (national tour, Jermyn Street Theatre and original theatre online). He also works as a theatre, film and TV consultant for Curtis Brown.  

Amal Chatterjee is a Departmental Lecturer in Fiction at Oxford Lifelong Learning. Amal was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Kolkata/Calcutta, India. His novel, Across the Lakes, was short-listed for the Crossword India Best Novel Award, and his short fiction has been published in numerous countries, including the Netherlands, India, and the UK. Amal is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and his non-fiction includes Representations of India, 1740-1840, and opinion pieces. Amal also edited and contributed to Writers on Writing. His short plays have been staged in London, he has had a Scottish Arts Council Writers Bursary, been shortlisted for a Creative Scotland Award, and was an advisor to the Literary Festival of the Hague. He is currently working on Prisoners of Empire: The Legacy of Colonialism, to be published by Hurst Publishers (UK) in 2026, and on a film script set in Scotland. He is also a founding member of and speaker with The Xenophiles, a group of migrant writers talking about matters that concern us all. 

Jane Draycott's collections from Carcanet Press include The Kingdom (2022), The Occupant (2016, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation), Over (shortlisted for the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize), The Night Tree (2004 PBS Recommendation) and Prince Rupert’s Drop (Forward Prize shortlist). Her illustrated collections Tideway and Christina the Astonishing (with Peter Hay and Lesley Saunders) are part of the 2022 'TRP Illustrated Classics' series. Nominated three times for the Forward Prizes for Poetry, her translation of the medieval dream-vision Pearl (2011) was a Stephen Spender Prize-winner. Other awards include the Keats Shelley Prize for Poetry, the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and several awards for her audio work with Elizabeth James. Storms Under the Skin (Two Rivers Press), her 2017 translations from the work of artist-poet Henri Michaux, is a PBS Recommendation. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Royal Literary Fund Consultant. 

Frank Egerton has reviewed fiction for publications that included The Times, TLS and the Financial Times. He is interested in both the close examination of fiction and how technologies such as ebooks and print-on-demand have changed the publishing industry, offering fresh opportunities to writers. He is a member of the Society of Authors and AWP and is a former editor of the Oxford Writer. He was chair of Writers in Oxford from 2008 to 2010. His first novel, The Lock, was published in paperback in 2003, the ebook version having been an Independent e-Book Awards finalist in Santa Barbara in 2002. His second novel, Invisible, was published in 2010. Also in 2010, he founded the micropublishing imprint StreetBooks. In 2016 he was co-investigator on a digital project looking at narrative shapes, and has recently completed a memoir entitled Trust: A Family Story. As well as teaching creative writing, he is a librarian and subject consultant with the Bodleian Libraries. 

Jonathan Evans has written more than a hundred and seventy commissioned scripts in the UK and Europe, from children's animation and live action family comedy, through continuing drama for adult audiences to feature films. A co-written detective series is currently under option and in development. His writing for children includes the BAFTA and RTS-winning Tracy Beaker Returns. His comedy feature film script, Act Your Age, was developed with the UK Film Council after winning their national ‘25 Words’ competition. He has written many 11 and 20-minute animation episodes across various series for European television. Jonathan has worked as a television story-liner for Freemantle, Grundy and Hewson International, and has assessed feature film scripts for Buena Vista.  

Dr Roopa Farooki is the author of over 14 books which have been published internationally in thirteen languages, including six critically acclaimed novels (The Good Children, The Flying Man, Half Life, The Way Things Look to Me, Corner Shop, Bitter Sweets) published with Headline and Pan Macmillan, a literary medical memoir, Everything is True, A Junior Doctor's Story of Life, Death and Grief in a time of Pandemic (Bloomsbury, 2022), a middle grade series with Oxford University Press, The Double Detectives Medical Mysteries, The Cure for a Crime (2020), Diagnosis Danger (2021) and Sweetcorn Superstar (2024) and a series of non-fiction illustrated medical books for children, Dr Roopa's Body Books, The Brilliant Brain, Super Skeleton, Glorious Gut, Hero Heart (Walker Books, 2024/2025). Roopa has been shortlisted/longlisted for the Women’s Prize (three times), the Muslim Writers’ Awards, The Commonword Prize, the DSC South Asian Literature Prize, the Impac Dublin Literary Award and in 2024 the ASE Science Education Book of the Year. She has been awarded the John C. Laurence Award from the Authors’ Foundation for writing which improves understanding between races, and an Arts Council Literature award. She began working as an NHS Doctor in Kent and London in 2019, winning a national medical prize in 2024, and was also elected to local government office in 2023 as a District Councillor supporting health, social care and the arts. 

Colin Grant is an author of five books. They include Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey; and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the Pen/Ackerley Prize, 2013. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year 2016. As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca; and A History of the N Word. Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Director of WritersMosaic, an innovative online platform for new writing. He also writes for newspapers and journals including The Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, TLS, London Review of Books, Granta and New York Review of Books. Grant’s Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC radio 4 Book of the Week and a Daily Telegraph Book of the year 2019. His latest memoir, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be, is published by Jonathan Cape on 26 January, 2023.  

Marybeth Hamilton is a writer and cultural historian and the author of two non-fiction books: In search of the blues (2007) and When I'm Bad I'm Better: Mae West, Sex and American Entertainment (1996). She is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. A longtime member of the editorial collective of History Workshop Journal, she also serves as Coordinating Editor of HWJ’s digital magazine History Workshop Online and as producer and presenter of the History Workshop Podcast and has written and presented several documentary features for BBC Radio. She is writing a cultural history of Valerie Solanas's 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol.  

Beatrice Hitchman is the author of Petite Mort (Serpent's Tail, 2013) and All of You Every Single One (Serpent's Tail, 2021). Her work has been translated into several languages and adapted as a Radio 4 Woman's Hour Drama. Petite Mort was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Author's Club Best First Novel Prize, the HWA Debut Prize and the Polari Prize. All of You Every Single One was nominated for the Polari Prize, the HWA Gold Crown Award and featured as one of Vogue's Best Books of 2022. Her scholarly interests include the endings of novels, queer theory and fiction, the Gothic and representations of the remote past.  

James Hawes was a university lecturer for seven years until his first novel, A White Merc with Fins, was published in 1996. He has had two feature films released, starring Joseph Fiennes and Michael Sheen respectively, and was co-producer on both. His fifth novel, Speak for England (2005), predicted Brexit and has been adapted by Andrew Davies, though not yet produced. His sixth novel with Jonathan Cape, My Little Armalite, was published in 2008, as was his controversial biography Excavating Kafka, which became the basis of a BBC TV documentary. Englanders and Huns was shortlisted for the Paddy Power Political Books of the Year 2015. The Shortest History of Germany (2017) has been translated into over twenty languages, and reached #2 in the Sunday Times non-fiction chart. His book, The Shortest History of England, was published in 2020. In 2022 he was "story consultant" and major on-screen contributor on BBC TVs seven-part history of British creativity. In 2024 he appeared in all three episodes of BBCTV’s Mozart: rise of a genius; his latest book is The Shortest History of Ireland (April 2025). 

Will Ing has worked in radio and television for over 25 years, mainly as a writer and script editor, working on hit shows like Would I Lie To You, 8 Out of 10 Cats, the Bafta winning kids' show Operation Ouch and the sitcom, Miranda. Fifteen years ago, he set up the production company, Black Dog Television, and started creating and producing his own shows – primarily entertainment and comedy formats and then moving into drama. He has recently written and produced two series of the kids’ comedy, Pickle Storm, for the BBC and a new crime drama, Art Detectives, for the American streamer, Acorn. 

Belinda Jack is Fellow and Tutor at Christ Church, University of Oxford. Her highly successful publications include The Woman Reader, George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large and Negritude and Literary Criticism: The History and Theory of “Negro-African” Literature in French. The Woman Reader was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic 2012 title. As well as her six books, Professor Jack is widely published through her many articles, essays, chapters and reviews. Her recent articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Literary Review, Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement, BBC History Magazine and Littérature. She is a regular on the BBC and international radio and television, as well as a frequent speaker at literary festivals. Professor Jack was the Gresham Professor of Rhetoric from 2013 to 2017. Her latest book, Very Short Introduction to Reading (OUP), was published in April 2019. She is currently working on a biography of Colette and translating four Colette works for Penguin World Classics.  

Keith Jarrett is a writer, educator and multiple poetry slam champion, selected for the International Literary Showcase as an outstanding LGBT writer. His poem, ‘From the Logbook’, was projected onto St. Paul’s Cathedral. His play, Safest Spot in Town, was performed at the Old Vic and aired on BBC Four. He has been widely anthologised, writing across poetry, fiction and essay forms. Film and TV appearances include Benjamin Zephaniah’s BAFTA-winning show Life & Rhymes. Keith holds a PhD from Birkbeck University and teaches at New York University in London. His collection, Selah, debuted in 2017; his next poetry collection and debut novel is currently forthcoming.  

Sabyn Javeri is the author of Hijabistan (Harper Collins: 2019) and the novel Nobody Killed Her (Harper Collins: 2017) and has edited the first non-fiction collection of essays by Pakistani women Ways of Being: Anthology of Pakistani Women’s Creative Non-Fiction (Women Unlimited: 2023) as well as two multilingual anthologies of student writing titled, The Arzu Anthology of Student Voices (HUP: 2019, 2018). Her writings have been published in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, South Asian Review, The London Magazine, Wasafiri, The Oxonian Review, Asymptote, Litro, Bookends Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Trespass, and World Literature. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized and she has won the Oxonian Review short story prize and has been shortlisted for the Tibor Jones, Leaf Books and Jawad Memorial Prize. She has a Master’s from the University of Oxford and a doctorate from the University of Leicester in Creative Writing. She is the recipient of the William B. Quarton Fellowship for International Writing Program’s 2024 Fall Residency at the University of Iowa. She teaches writing and global literature at New York University, Abu Dhabi.  

Susan Jones is Professor Emerita of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St Hilda’s College. Formerly a soloist with Scottish Ballet, she writes literary and cultural criticism and has published widely on Joseph Conrad and on modernism, women’s writing, and the history and aesthetics of dance. Her book Literature, Modernism, and Dance appeared with Oxford University Press in 2013. She is currently completing a book for OUP on Samuel Beckett and Choreography. She is also Director of Dance Scholarship Oxford (DANSOX), a programme supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/dansox; https://www.st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/dansox  

Line Langebek is a Danish-born screenwriter, based in London. Her most recent feature film, The Girl with the Needle (director Magnus von Horn) was in Official Competition in Cannes 2024 and had its North American premiere at TIFF24. It was released in numerous territories by MUBI worldwide from December 2024 onwards. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar as Best Foreign Film. Line and Magnus von Horn were also nominated for a Best Screenplay Award at the European Film Awards 2024. At the recent Polish Film Awards, the film won 11 ‘Eagles’ in total, including an Eagle for Line and von Horn for Best Screenplay. Line’s past screen credits include the US feature film I’LL COME RUNNING, SINK OR SWIM for Channel 4, the Albanian-set documentary DUAM DRÏTE: WE WANT LIGHT for French television, EVERGREEN, ANONYMOUS as well as FIELD STORY (director Eva Weber). Recent projects include writing REPATRIATION, a BFI/funded project with writer/director Matthew Murdoch. She was the head writer and wrote a dozen episodes for the TV series ROYALS NEXT DOOR (Pikkukala Productions). In 2015, she co-founded Raising Films. She is also a member of the WGGB’s Film Committee, and as part of the Dissonant Futures Collective, she has worked on an Arts Council England-funded project about climate grief. For 2023/2024, she was funded by ACE to work on a novel.  

Marti Leimbach is the author of seven novels for adults and one for young adults. Widely translated, and published worldwide, her books include the Waterstone's bestseller, Daniel Isn’t Talking, and the international bestseller, Dying Young, which reached number five on the New York Times Bestseller list and was made into a film starring Julia Roberts. Marti's young adult novel, Dragonfly Girl, was published in 2021 by Katherine Tegen Books/Harper Collins and Pocket Jeunesse in France. She's published pieces in national magazines and newspapers across the world, including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Cosmopolitan UK, Vogue UK, Vogue USA, You Magazine (UK), Cosmopolitan (USA), Chatelaine (Canada), The Globe and Mail (Canada), Stella Magazine, as well as in trade publications such as The Bookseller and Newbooks. 

Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, children’s author and translator. She has had seven plays and poetry cycles performed at major UK theatres, including the Leicester Haymarket, the Royal Festival Hall, the Polka Theatre, London (for children) and Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, where Jenny was a Core Writing Tutor for 20 years. Her first book of poetry, When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996), was broadcast on BBC Woman’s Hour, translated into Russian and made into an opera premiered by the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company of Russia in 2017. Jenny has published three further collections: Fathom and Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, 2007/ 2014) and Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet Classics, 2018), which was a New Statesman Book of the Year, a Carcanet Book of the Year, an LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and Carcanet’s first ever audiobook (2019). Jenny has also published three chapbooks from Mulfran Press in English and Arabic with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh, which are part of the award-winning, Arts Council-funded ‘Writing Mesopotamia’ project aimed at fostering friendships between English and Arabic-speaking communities. Her translation (with Ruba Abughaida and others) of Al-Sayegh’s work, Let Me Tell You What I Saw, was published by Seren in October 2020. 

Rachel Long is a writer and founder of the Octavia Poetry Collective for Women of Colour. Her debut poetry collection, My Darling from the Lions, was published by Picador in the UK in 2020, and by Tin House in the US in 2021. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Costa Book Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the Jhalak Prize Book of the Year by a Writer of Colour. The US edition was a TIME book of the year. Other works (both poetry and non-fiction) have been published, most notably, in The Guardian, Poetry, Granta, The Poetry Review, and The White Review. She has curated and co-produced multiple programmes for BBC Radio, as well as events for Tate, Africa Writes, and the University of Kingston. Rachel has judged numerous literary prizes, including the National Poetry Competition, the Rathbone Folio Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Poetry London Prize. Long has taught at Goldsmiths University College, London, University of Hertfordshire, Barbican Young Poets programme, The Arvon Foundation, Faber Academy, The Poetry School, and The Irish Writers Centre.  

Harry Man’s first book of poetry, Lift (Tall Lighthouse, 2013), won the UNESCO Bridges of Struga Award. He has been Poet in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, Hurst Castle, for NHS South Tees and at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, among others. His pamphlet Finders Keepers, illustrated by Sophie Gainsley, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and was displayed at London’s Southbank Centre. His book-length collection of elegies, Deretter (‘Thereafter’), written collaboratively with the Norwegian poet Endre Ruset, won a Northern Writers Award, the Stephen Spender Prize, and was a Broken Sleep Books and a Dagbladet Book of the Year. It was additionally a finalist for the Iowa Review Awards and was displayed in Birmingham’s RBSA gallery in 2025. His work has been translated into 11 languages, and he has been both a TOAST poetry fellow and a Hawthornden Fellow. He was recently commended for the WB Yeats Prize. He is a Royal Literary Fund Reading Round Fellow in County Durham. His latest collection, Popular Song, is published by Nine Arches Press. 

Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955, lives in Oxford and has published eight books of poetry, including The Marble Fly (1997), which won the Forward Prize, Out There (2012), which won the Hawthornden Prize and most recently Drypoint (2024). A selected poems, Sky Nails, was published by Faber in 2001, and a new Selected Poems was published in 2016. He edited The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems in 2004, and his translations of the six books of Giorgio Bassani’s The Novel of Ferrara were published individually by Penguin Modern Classics and in one volume by Norton. His translation of Valerio Magrelli’s poems, The Embrace, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the John Florio Prize. He has translated Pier Paolo Pasolini’s verse play, Fabrication, and the poems of Antonella Anedda, Archipelago, which also won the John Florio Prize. In 2019, he received the Cholmondeley Award. The Foreign Connection, a book of his writings on poetry, translation and art, was published in 2020, and his self-illustrated pamphlet of poems, The Years (2020), won the Michael Marks Poetry Illustration award.  

Peter Moore is a non-fiction writer. His books Endeavour (2018) and The Weather Experiment (2015) have been Sunday Times Top Ten Bestsellers, and his debut, Damn His Blood, was serialised as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His work has been translated widely, and The Weather Experiment was chosen as one of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2015. He freelances regularly for The Literary Review, presents a podcast called Travels Through Time and has been a writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library in Flintshire.  

Jamie Nuttgens is an award-winning writer, producer and director in TV and Film with over 25 years’ experience working with writers across different genres and platforms. Following a career in Rep and Devised Theatre and as a Writer-Producer in Commercial Radio, he joined BBC Drama Serials to script-edit Jimmy McGovern’s The Lakes. After a stint at Casualty, he moved to ITV to produce The Bill and a spin-off series, Burnside. For Channel 4, he developed and co-produced Red Riding, a series of TV films based on David Peace’s Northern Noir novels. He has produced the award-winning work of UK Indian writer-director, Smita Bhide, including Cup & Lip, The Blue Tower (Best UK Feature Raindance Film Festival) and Another Planet (Golden Award IFF Goa). His own screenwriting has included Casualty, The Bill and Crossroads. He is currently Head of Drama at Ten66 Television (Black Lesbian Handbook / Love In The Flesh). At the Met Film School, Ealing Studios, he headed the MA in Screenwriting from 2013 to 2021, is currently teaching at Curtis Brown Creative and has been a visiting lecturer at NFTS, La Femis Paris, Stanford at Oxford, Northern Film School, University of Westminster, Polish Film School Lodz, and Blanquerna Barcelona.  

Dr Matthew Parvin is a published playwright and screenwriter with a PhD in English from the University of Cambridge. His play Gentlemen was included in The Telegraph’s Best Theatre of 2023, nominated for three Off West End awards, and published by Aurora Metro. Jam is published by Bloomsbury, and was nominated for two Off West End awards for its run at the Finborough Theatre. He has had plays on at the Soho Theatre, Theatre503, VAULT Festival, and his adaptation of Alice In Wonderland toured to the Arcola Theatre in London and the Edinburgh Fringe. Matthew also has a number of screen projects in development, including a BFI-funded feature adaptation of one of his plays. He has lectured in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes and the University of Greenwich, on prose fiction at the University of Chichester, and he has taught classes on playwriting, theatre and film at Cambridge. Matthew did his BA at Jesus College, Oxford, and his MSt at Lincoln College, Oxford. 

Tina Pepler has written extensively for BBC radio – original plays, dramatisations, and drama-documentaries – which have been broadcast on Radio 4, Radio 3 and the World Service. Her television work includes Say Hello to the Real Dr Snide, an original play for Channel 4; a two-hour historical drama, Princes in the Tower (Channel 4); and several episodes of A Most Mysterious Murder (BBC1), which she co-wrote with Julian Fellowes. She also co-authored with him an episode of his television series Downton Abbey (ITV). Recent radio work includes the drama-documentaries Forgiving, Crisis, and Syria: Bread and Bombs (all BBC Radio 4). Her radio play Kaleidoscope 3 was commissioned as part of the BBC's Centenary programming and was broadcast on Radio 4 in September 2023. Her first podcast was a four-part drama which appeared on HistoryHit early in 2019. She is a Consultant Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, and with RLF sponsorship has delivered workshops for refugees in Bristol. She has been a tutor with Arvon and has run radio drama workshops and retreats in South Africa in a scheme sponsored by the BBC, the Arts Council, and SABC and the Performing Arts Network of South Africa (PANSA).  

Ingrid Persaud is a Trinidadian writer, artist and former legal academic who lives in London. Her prize-winning debut novel Love After Love, (Faber & Faber 2020) won the Costa First Novel Award (2020), Author’s Club First Novel Award (2020) and the Indie Book Award for Fiction (2021). Her short story ‘The Sweet Sop’ also won the BBC National Short Story Award (2018) and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2017).  Her second novel, The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh (Faber & Faber 2024) was published in April 2024. Persaud is Writer in Residence at University of the West Indies, Trinidad campus, during Spring 2025. 

Sophie Ratcliffe writes memoir, biography, criticism – and things that are a mixture of all three. She is Professor of Literature and Creative Criticism at the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, and has published widely in the field of literature, emotion and histories of reading. Her first biography, P.G. Wodehouse: A Life In Letters (Hutchinson, 2011), took a relatively conventional approach to life-writing. Her recent experimental memoir, The Lost Properties of Love: An Exhibition of Myself (William Collins, 2019), was named as one of Prospect magazine’s books of the year. It is forthcoming in the USA, with Northwestern University Press, in April 2024 as Loss, A Love Story. A former judge for the Baillie Gifford and Wellcome Book Prizes, Sophie regularly reviews books for the national press. She is currently working on two projects: an academic book about libraries, children and gender – and something that might resemble a novel.  

The author of twelve plays, John Retallack’s work has been translated into several languages and performed around the UK as well as in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Holland and France. He has toured and directed productions in India, Japan and America as well as throughout Europe. His work has been awarded an Olivier, two Herald Angels, two TMA awards and a Fringe First. From 1977–85 he was the founding director of the Actors Touring Company (ATC). He was Artistic Director of Oxford Stage Company (at the Oxford Playhouse) from 1989 to 1999. From 2001 to 2011, he was the founding director of the London-based Company of Angels, which continues to produce new and experimental work for young audiences. Six of his plays for Company of Angels are published by Oberon Books, and two by Methuen. John’s sequel, Hannah and Hanna in Dreamland (2018), is also published by Oberon. He directed Unicorns, Almost for the Hay Festival, which was revived for the 2019 Edinburgh Festival and broadcast on Radio 3 in May 2020. He adapted Sandro Veronesi’s The Hummingbird for Radio 3 which was nominated for Best Audio Dramatisation, 2022, in the BBC Radio awards. He directed All I Was When I Wasn’t Anyone about the poet Fernando Pessoa for Radio 3 in 2023. He was the Royal Literary Foundation Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, for 2019-21. He has recently written a memoir titled Theatremaker. His new play Van Gogh and Me opens in Oxford on July 31st, 2025.