Jeremy Seal writes non-fiction books which combine travel and history, often taking the culture of Turkey – a life-long interest – as their inspiration. His books include: A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat (Picador, 1995) which was short-listed for the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award; The Snakebite Survivors Club: Travels Among Serpents (Picador, 1999) which was a New York Public Library ‘Exceptional Book of the Year’; The…
…that stories have to bridge cultural, temporal, political and religious divides. Ann continues to blog about international literature at ayearofreadingtheworld.com. She has given a TED talk, and her literary journey has inspired and informed many personal and group ventures around the globe. As a result, she sits on English PEN’s PEN Translates funding panel and has helped draw up the longlists for several literary prizes, including the Commonwealth Foundation’s short story prize and the FT/OppenheimerFunds…
Helen Grant writes Gothic thrillers for a crossover (young adult/adult) audience. She draws on atmospheric locations and local folklore for inspiration; her books are distinctive for their international settings. Her first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, was published by Penguin in 2009; it was shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the Booktrust Teenage prize, and won an ALA Alex award in the USA. Since then, Helen has written a further five…
Anita Mason is a novelist who is drawn to ideas but also enjoys telling a good story. Her books range widely in subject-matter and setting but have in common an interest in history, religion and the compromises imposed by politics. Her first novel Bethany ambiguously probes a high-minded commune in 1970s Cornwall; her second The Illusionist, shortlisted for the 1983 Booker prize, tracks the spectacular and scurrilous career of Simon Magus and the divisions among…
Jane Bingham is a versatile writer for children and teenagers. Over the past 12 years, she has written more than 100 books for publishers such as Usborne, Heinemann, Hodder and Penguin. While she believes that any subject can be made exciting for young readers, her main areas of interest are history and art. Her history books aim to inject a sense of fun into learning about the past, and include titles such as Welcome to…
…March 2007. Most recently, her work featured in Protest: Stories of Resistance (Comma Press, 2017). For 8 years, Laura managed an international arts-related website on which she sought out and published new poetry, short stories, reviews, interviews, etc. A regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation and the Scottish Book Trust, she also works as a writing mentor and teaches creative writing in secondary schools and colleges throughout the UK. In 1999 she was Scottish writer-in-residence…
Following a dismal school ‘career’, David eventually read English at Cardiff in the 1970s and then taught in a Shropshire further education college for fifteen years. After a string of rejections and near misses, Night’s Black Agents was published by HarperCollins in 1993, and subsequently short-listed for the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Best First Crime Novel’ award. It was described by Philip Oakes in the Literary Review as ‘a tale of crime and punishment…
Mike Harris is a scriptwriter and theatre director. He has written over 150 scripts for radio, stage and television, including soaps and serials, adaptations, one-off dramas, theatre in education, youth and children’s theatre and large-scale community plays. He teaches part-time on the MA in writing at Sheffield Hallam University and has published in international academic journals and anthologies, including The Handbook of Creative Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and The Good Fiction Guide (Oxford University…
…rural community, and, among other things, examines the relevance of the pastoral as location and fictional mode: the play between metaphoric and literal, nostalgia and documentary, fantasy and (often brutal) reality. Jane came to writing relatively late. After reading English at university she worked for a couple of years at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and then for a dozen years during the 1990s in the poetry department of Faber. It wasn’t until she…
…Muslims and Jews. A lifelong Brontë enthusiast, she also works as a volunteer guide and speaker at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Tamar received her B.A. degree from Oxford University in Hebrew and Arabic. She has worked as a primary school teacher and a college lecturer in Judaism. She recently completed a gothic novel, set in a Victorian hydro over 160 years and dealing with obsessive love, madness, suicide and ghosts, both literal and metaphorical. There…