Luan Goldie is a Glasgow born novelist, short story writer and teacher from East London.

Her work has been nominated for several literary awards including the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. Her novels for adults include Nightingale Point, Homecoming and These Streets (HarperCollins).

In 2018 she won the Costa Short Story Award, and her short stories have appeared in Stylist, HELLO! Magazine and the Sunday Express. She was also one of thirteen writers invited to CERN to collaborate with physicists for Collision, a short story collection.

Goldie’s series of books for children aged 9+ was released in 2024. Skylar and the K-pop Headteacher was followed by Oops, I Kidnapped a Pharaoh! (Walker Books) and Skylar and the K-pop Principal (Candlewick Press, USA).

A former primary school teacher, Goldie now runs creative writing workshops for children and adults. She has worked with Arvon and Spread the Word and is a First Story Writer-in-Residence.

You can find her on Instagram at /luangoldie

Eley Williams' collection of short stories Attrib. & Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017) won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her writing appears in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Liberating the Canon, the TLS and the London Review of Books. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Author photo © Idil Sukan.

Jude Brown grew up in Middlesbrough, a town in the north east of England. She has lived in London, Liverpool, Reading and Sydney and travelled widely in Europe. She has also visited the USA, Canada, Indonesia, Australia and Hong Kong. A career butterfly she's worked as a secretary, nurse, designer, art therapist and creative writing tutor.

She moved to Sheffield, England, to study an MA in Creative Writing where she began writing His Dark Sun, her debut novel. Her short stories and poems have been published in several anthologies and her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport and Raymond Carver Short Story Prizes. She is the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award and an Arts Council Award. His Dark Sun is published by Mayfly Press, a member of the Northern Fiction Alliance, and part of New Writing North and Moth Publishing.

At the age of ten she spent her summer break writing a full length children's book, which she typed up on a Petite typewriter. She moved house a year later and the manuscript got lost in transition after the family decluttered. She is still sore about it and remains a fully paid-up hoarder.

SJ Bradley is an award-winning writer from Leeds, UK. She is the winner of a K Blundell Trust and a Saboteur Award, and was a recent graduate from Cambridge University's Teaching Creative Writing PGcert, attending with a scholarship from First Story. She was director of the Northern Short Story Festival for five years, has taught short story writing for Comma Press and First Story in schools in Leeds and Bradford, and has been shortlisted for the Willesden Herald and Gladstone Writers in Residence awards. Connect with her on Instagram, Twitter & Bsky @bradleybooks.

Lucas Stewart is an award winning author and literature programmer. Born in the UK he has spent over 20 years living in Asia and Africa, including Iraq, Sudan and Myanmar. A former Literature Advisor to the British Council he has advised leading international literature organisations such as PEN International, the Publishers Circle Delegation, Index on Censorship, the UK’s National Centre for Writing, Asia House and the Hedda Foundation on transitional literature and literary industries in Myanmar.

His debut non-fiction book The People Elsewhere: Unbound Journeys with the Storytellers of Myanmar (Penguin/Viking 2016) was shortlisted for the 2018 Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Other non-fiction, on ethnic nationality literature and wider literary censorship, have been published widely including Pen America, The Diplomat and the Asia Literary Review.

He is co-editor, with Alfred Birnbaum, of Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds: Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar, (British Council, 2017), the first anthology of translated ethnic Myanmar short stories published in the UK.

His own short stories have won the national DA Prize for Short Fiction, nominated for Best of the Net and appeared in multiple places including twice anthologized by UK ‘Northern Publisher of the Year’, Comma Press (most recently Resist: Stories of Uprising, Oct 2019).

Website: www.sadaik.com