Michael Arditti is a novelist, short story writer and critic, who has been described by Philip Pullman as 'our best chronicler of the rewards and pitfalls of present day faith.'

 

He began his career writing plays for the stage and radio and for many years worked as a theatre critic for the Evening Standard.   

 

His novels are The Celibate (1993), Pagan and Her Parents (1996), Easter (2000), Unity (2005), A Sea Change (2006), and The Enemy of the Good (2009).  

 

His short story collection, Good Clean Fun, was published in 2004. 

  

Website: www.michaelarditti.com

William Boyd, born in Accra, Ghana, in 1952, was educated at Gordonstoun School and attended the universities of Nice (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow (M.A.Hons in English and Philosophy) and Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied for a D.Phil in English Literature. He lectured in English Literature at St. Hilda's College (1980-83). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been presented with honorary Doctorates in Literature from the universities of St. Andrews, Stirling, Glasgow and Dundee. In 2005 he was awarded the CBE. His internationally acclaimed novels and stories have been translated into over thirty languages: A Good Man in Africa (Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize, 1981); An Ice Cream War (John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, shortlisted for Booker Prize, 1982); Stars and Bars (1984); The New Confessions (1987); Brazzaville Beach (the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1990); The Blue Afternoon (the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, 1995); Armadillo (1998); Any Human Heart (the Prix Jean Monnet 2002); Restless (Costa Book Award, Novel of the Year 2006); School Ties, a memoir of his schooldays (1985); On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995) and Fascination (2004), three collections of short stories; the speculative memoir Nat Tate: an American Artist (1998); Bamboo (2005), a collection of his non-fiction writings; and Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009) his most recent novel. Screenwriting credits include: Stars and Bars, Mr Johnson, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Chaplin, A Good Man in Africa, The Trench (which he also directed) and Man to Man; an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop and Sword of Honour trilogy for television; the three-part adaptation of Armadillo (BBC 1 2001 and A&E in the US 2002). He made a film about Shakespeare and his sonnets — A Waste of Shame – (2005 BBC 4). He has written two original TV films about boarding-school life in England -- Good and Bad at Games (1983) and Dutch Girls (1985).

He is married and divides his time between London and South West France.

Lucy Cohen, a history graduate, did a post-graduate course in print journalism, during which time she ‘wrote quite a lot about solitude and being alone’. She then worked as a researcher for a documentary company and from there began to make her own films. In August, 2008, her work featured in Channel 4's Generation Next season: documentary new talent strand First Cut showed her extraordinary directorial debut, Watch Me Disappear. Each year in Britain around 2,500 people are buried alone. No one claims them, and no one attends their funerals. Driven by a desire to find out more about these lonely individuals, this film pieces together two peoples' lives, and asks how - in crowded, hectic, connected, modern Britain - it is possible for anyone to simply slip through the cracks and disappear.

Amanda Craig was born in South Africa in 1959. Her parents, loathing apartheid, moved to London. Her father’s work took her to Italy where books became important to her, both as a portable form of Englishness and because the childhood misery of asthma was made only bearable by sinking herself into reading. The storyteller became to her a kind of magician. She read English at Clare College Cambridge. Young Journalist of the year and winner of the Catherine Pakenham award, her first article for The Times was accepted, and taken up by The Telegraph as controversial. Journalism led to aspects of the contemporary world feeding into her fiction: Foreign Bodies (1990). A Private Place (1991) led to her becoming a critic on The Independent. A Vicious Circle (1996), attacking corruption in the literary scene, became a best seller. In A Dark Wood (2000) deals with manic depression. Love in Idleness (2003) is pure comedy. As the children’s critic for The Times, she was early to spot JK Rowling and Philip Pullman, and addresses the regeneration of children’s literature. Largely because of illness Hearts and Minds (2009) took six years to write. Partly due to her dependence on a series of foreign helpers during that time she realised that the lives of immigrants, both legal and illegal, is one of the great untold stories of our lives, and that the apartheid from which her parents had originally fled had developed in a different form in Britain.

 

Website: www.AmandaCraig.com

Chloë, who lives just outside Northleach, has loved language and the spoken word all her life, writing her first story aged 5, and listening spellbound to a family friend reading aloud Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham. She originally trained in theatre skills at London ’s Central School of Speech & Drama.  A copywriter and international speaker for 15 years, she founded Midnight Storytellers in 1999 and is the Cotswolds’ very own rebel raconteur performing without scripts or books, in the ancient oral tradition of storytelling.  Her work is inspired by myths, legends and folktales from many cultures while she also thrills audiences with original material. With her singing bowl, silver dancing drum and high energy style, she is a hit with family audiences throughout the UK. She’s performed at Cheltenham Literature Festival, the award winning Roald Dahl Museum and Woking’s The Lightbox Gallery, Gloucester ’s Waterways Museum, Sudeley Castle and many National Trust properties.  Her appearance at Chipping Campden Literature Festival comes at the height of the Midnight Storytellers’ 10th anniversary ‘Not Mad Or Dead’ celebration tour. “I’m delighted to be involved in the first Chipping Campden Literature Festival during my own 10th anniversary celebrations. It’s wonderful for this gorgeous Cotswold town to have its own literature festival in addition to the famous Dover Games and the music festival, and I look forward to adding to the magic.”

Horatio Clare, born in London (1973) has written three books and contributed to three anthologies. He grew up with his brother on a hill farm in the Black Mountains of south Wales, was expelled from Malvern College, then educated at Atlantic College, and read English at the University of York. In Running for the Hills (Somerset Maugham Award 2007, longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award 2006, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, 2007) he recalls the eccentric, romantic and often harsh conditions of his childhood. Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope (2007) describes his attempts at provincial journalism when stoned, manic or depressed, in thrall to the writings of the Romantics and the idea of Hunter S. Thompson. After a series of disastrous and eccentric escapades he ends up penniless on the streets of London, with a criminal record. He has worked as a producer on Front Row (Radio 4), Night Waves and The Verb (Radio 3) for which he now freelances. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Spectator, The New Statesman, The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph and Vogue.

Joanna Ezekiel, born in Essex, now lives in Middlesex. She has an MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development from Sussex University and works as a tutor for the Open University and the Open College of the Arts'? Her first full collection is scheduled for publication in 2010. Her work appeared in the Ragged Raven anthology, Writing On Water (2005). This press had been interested in her poetry from the time of A Braid Of Words, (2003) a booklet released by Poetry Monthly Press.

 

Joanna Ezekiel... investigates with honesty and intelligence elements of her Jewish heritage. (Iota)  

 

The compressed energy and an unswerving courage to tell the truth about her own family history marks many of Ezekiel's poems with a sharp edge — a kind of elegiac journey that leaves the reader wanting to know more.  

Patricia Prime New Hope International  

 

Ezekiel is very good at painting images with her small, neat brush... the more I read, the more I felt each word had been carefully chosen and placed.  

Eleanor Livingstone Happenstance

Graham Fawcett is one of the original tutors of The Poetry School, founded in 1997. He devises and teaches poetry courses and on-location days (among them Blake in Sussex, Hardy in Dorset, Clare at Helpston, Milton in Florence, and Eliot in East Coker, Little Gidding and Burnt Norton). His courses and days are designed to encourage the reading of poetry past and present from around the world. He lectures on poetry in the UK, Italy and Spain, and has made many programmes on literature and music for BBC Radio 3, including a play about Mozart, and a translation of Dante's La Vita Nuova for BBC Radio Drama.

 

He is president of the T S Eliot Society (UK) and a trustee of Outside In, the children's world literature charity. Projects in 2010 include on-location days on Hopkins, Keats and Donne, the Pepys 350 celebrations of Samuel Pepys’s diary, and a new series of supper lectures on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

 

Website: www.GrahamFawcett.co.uk

Adam Foulds lives in South London. He read English at St. Catherine's, Oxford, has a Creative Writing MA from UEA and received the Harper-Wood fellowship from St. John's College, Cambridge.

 

His poetry, praised by Christopher Reid and Craig Raine, has appeared in magazines such as Arete, Stand and Quadrant.  

 

His novel The Truth About These Strange Times won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. The Broken Word (2008) is a novella in verse set during the Mau-Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya. The Quickening Maze, short-listed for the Man Booker 2009, contains the story of John Clare’s memories and descent into insanity as a patient at Dr Matthew Allen’s High Beach Private Asylum, in Epping Forest to where Clare eventually escapes to find asylum with a band of gypsies.

 

Website: www.uea.ac.uk/creativewriting/interviewsAdamFoulds

Angela France has had poems published in many of the leading journals, in the UK and US and has been anthologised – most recently in A Twist of Malice: ‘uncomfortable poems by older women'. Angela is an experienced reader and workshop leader: she has read at some of the major poetry venues including Cheltenham Literature Festival and Ledbury Poetry Festival.

 

Angela also runs ‘Buzzwords’ poetry café - a monthly live poetry event in her home town of Cheltenham. Ragged Raven published her collection, Occupation (2009).

 

An impressive second collection from a poet with a talent to surprise and delight. (Other Poetry, Summer 2009). …establishes a clear, firm, valuable voice in contemporary poetry (George Szirtes).

 

Angela France's poems are rich, attentive and strange. (Alison Brackenbury).

David Gaffney, born in West Cumbria, now living in Manchester, is the author of the highly acclaimed short story collections Sawn Off Tales (2006) and Aromabingo (2007). Buildings Crying Out is a story using lost cat posters (Lancaster litfest 2009), 23 Stops To Hull is a collection of stories about junctions on the M62 (Humbermouth festival 2009) Rivers Take Them is a set of short operas with composer Ailis Ni Riain (BBC Radio Three 2008) and DestroyPowerPoint are stories in PowerPoint format (Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009).

 

His novel Never Never (2008), a humorous portrayal of addiction to credit, was inspired by his work as a debt counsellor in Moss Side. He has also worked as a film studies lecturer, a pub pianist and holiday camp entertainer.

 

Website: www.DavidGaffney.co.uk

Patrick Gale has written over ten novels, the most recent of which, Notes from an Exhibition, has become a bestseller thanks to its being picked up by the Richard and Judy Book Club. Rough Music, A Sweet Obscurity and Friendly Fire, are beginning to win him a European following thanks to successful translations into French and Dutch. He was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962, raised in Winchester and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He now lives on his husband’s farm at Land’s End in Cornwall. As well as writing fiction, he is a keen musician, playing the ‘cello in the Belerion Consort and the Penzance Orchestral Society and singing in the chorus of the St Endellion Summer Festival which he also chairs. He is a dog lover, a keen cook and an obsessive gardener. In 2007 he collaborated with composer, John Nicholls, on a one-man “enhanced reading” of his macabre short story, Wig, which toured the UK. He’s a regular book reviewer for the Independent and guest critic on BBC Radio 4’s weekly arts magazine, Saturday Review.

 

To find out more about Patrick and his novels, visit www.GaleWarning.org.

Sue Gee is a novelist and short story writer who also teaches creative writing. The Mysteries of Glass was long listed for the 2005 Orange Prize, and Reading in Bed was a Daily Mail Book Club Selection in 2007. She is a frequent contributor to Slightly Foxed.

Mary Gray works in the Chipping Campden Bookshop. After initially training as a psychiatric nurse, she established and ran her own successful retail company in Essex.

 

In 2000 she sold the business, moved to Wiltshire and went to Bristol University, where she read Archaeology. She went on to do an M. Phil. in Historical Archaeology, and has been involved in a number of research projects.

Samantha Harvey was born in England in 1975. She has lived in Ireland, New Zealand and Japan writing, travelling and teaching, and in recent years has co-founded an environmental charity alongside her novel writing. She completed with distinction the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course in 2005, where she was short-listed for the PFD prize. The Wilderness is her first novel. It was short listed for the Orange Prize 20009 and the Guardian first book award 2009 and long-listed for the 2009 Booker.

 

Website: www.SamanthaHarvey.com

Cicely Havely read English at Somerville. In 1970 she joined the fledgling Open University.  Through her writing and television broadcasting over many years and many courses, she has helped countless students to discover the pleasures of literature.

Sheila Hayman, former Young Journalist of the Year (1990) won the BAFTA/Fulbright Fellowship, sending her to Los Angeles to learn screenwriting. Sheila, who has won an international Emmy, and Time Out Documentary Series of the Year, has written and directed many TV films on subjects as varied as stammering, Chinese abortion, the symbolism of car design, and American corporate culture. Her most recent film, Mendelssohn, The Nazis, and Me was shown on BBC TV (2009). She has written three original screenplays and two adaptations, including Mrs. P's Journey, the story of the woman who invented the A-Z, and The Water Babies and has published two comic novels about family life: Small Talk and Are we Nearly There Yet?

 

Her recently published third novel Mrs Normal Saves the World is a cross-platform multimedia extravaganza linked to the web site MrsNormal.com.  

 

In 2004 she took over Write to Life the therapeutic writing programme of the Medical Foundation, which she continues to run. Sheila also played the fiddle in the Irish band that featured in the movie ‘Titanic’.

Winner of the 2008 National Poetry Competition (announced 2009), Chris James, MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, lives in Suffolk with family, a banjo and a mortgage. He is one of the brightest young voices in British poetry. He has won the Bridport and Ledbury poetry prizes and in 2002 won an Eric Gregory Award. He took part in the 2004 Aldeburgh Festival Poetry Masterclass. His first collection is The Invention Of Butterfly (2006).

 

This wonderful collection is infused with and sustained by an ebullience that, at times, is almost exhausting. Too grounded to be surreal, too substantial to be conceits, dense in content but light in touch, many of these poems are written in the style of comic magic realism. The sense of delight they carry, their wit, inventiveness and warmth, are overwhelming. (Paul Lee, Poetry Nottingham) James' ability to develop an original idea, character or place is remarkable, and he writes on the sure foundation of a genuine talent. (Will Daunt, Envoi)

Chris Kinsey, who grew up in Herefordshire, studied in Yorkshire and has lived in Powys since 1979, was BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year 2008. Her collections are: Kung Fu Lullabies (2004).

 

A quiet voice and a sure one. No desperate writhings, no crippling doubt, no basking in uncertainty. Moreover a voice, damn her, achieved without apparent agony of effort. A blithe spirit, serene and unhurried in her way but maybe, beneath the surface, paddling like fury. Nothing shows but calm, wry, interested observation, a quirky sense of humour... It is a pleasure to read the work of a poet who invites me into her eyes rather than clobbering me with introspection. More please." (Francis Uhlman, Dream Catcher).

 

This is precision work, often pared down and laconic, sometimes unflinching, but always with its own tenderness." (Jan Fortune-Wood, Coffee House Poetry).  

 

Cure For A Crooked Smile (2009).

 

She has read her work at Ledbury Poetry Festival, Ty Newydd Festival and at various poetry cafes and events around the UK.

Lindsay Mackie was a journalist for The Guardian, specializing in race and home affairs, film critic with The Herald and arts feature writer with The Scotsman. She is a consultant for the New Economics Foundation. She is on the board of English PEN and chairs its Readers and Writers Programme. An educationalist who specializes in creating extra-curricular programmes for schools, she co-founded FILMCLUB, believing that the art of story-telling and the medium of film go hand in hand, helping to enrich young people’s understanding, concentration and emotional development. Previously she established the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Award for Young People which now has 26,000 Diana Award Holders across the UK. Working with Education Extra, she has also set up 300 Reading for Pleasure clubs in secondary schools. She works with the Guardian Newsroom, the educational side of the Guardian newspaper, and has established ongoing teachers’ seminars in current affairs and literature.

Nigel McLoughlin is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire and Course Leader for their MA in Creative & Critical Writing. His work has been twice short-listed for a Hennessy Award and placed in The Kavanagh Prize and The New Writer Poetry Prize. He holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing and a PhD from Lancaster University. He has written five collections of poetry: At The Waters’ Clearing (2001), Songs For No Voices (2004), Blood (2005), Dissonances (2007) and Chora: New & Selected Poems ( 2009). He also co-edited Breaking The Skin (2002) an anthology of new Irish poets. His poetry and translations from Irish and German have been published in literary journals and anthologies in Ireland, Britain, Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and Japan. He has read his work at many of the leading poetry venues and festivals in the UK and Ireland and he is Editor of Iota poetry journal.

  

Website: www.NigelMcLoughlin.co.uk

Lizzie Mee, illustrator of Herman of Herm Island, has a love of natural objects. She studied at Falmouth University College of Arts and is also a qualified teacher. She has had several exhibitions. ‘Found objects' is a theme running through much of her work. She has exhibited in Bristol at Spike Print Studio and as part of the South Bank Arts Trail.

 

Her work has been included in IMPACT (the international print conference). Other illustration work includes educational resources for a museum in Wiltshire.

 

She is currently working at Cotham School, in Bristol.

Former co-editor of Iota poetry magazine, Bob Mee co-edits Ragged Raven Press and lives and works in Snitterfield, Warwickshire. Poetry collections: The Maker Of Glass Eyes (2009) and Paradise Road (2003). He has read poetry to live audiences since the early 1970s. He has also written books on boxing, including the critically acclaimed social history of bare-knuckle prize-fighting, Bare Fists (Harper Collins & Overlook Press, New York) which perhaps makes him the only poet to have had his writing reviewed in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, the New York Times, Playboy and Flaunt. Bob still does commentary work for Eurosport.  

 

...the reflective wanderer meets the stand-up comic, with results that are consistently lively and, at times, warmly wise. (Michael W Thomas, Other Poetry)   

 

…stories that replay in the mind long after the telling, atmospheres that stick and images that one recalls almost as if one's own experience. (Sam Smith, The Journal).   

 

…a wry conversational style… the apparent simplicity can be deceptive… (Sybil Ruth, Raw Edge)

Janet Murch has a love of natural objects and an eye-catching stone on a beach on the Channel Island, Herm, inspired her to write the story Herman of Herm Island.  

 

She has worked as a newspaper and magazine journalist and was co-editor of Iota poetry magazine from 2002 until 2008. Her poems have been published in small press magazines.

 

Born and bred in Iver, Buckinghamshire, she now lives near Stratford-upon-Avon with her family and assorted animals. 

Gail Pirkis, publisher and founding co-editor of Slightly Foxed , has worked in publishing for 30 years.  As editor at Macmillan, Oxford University Press and John Murray many of the books she published received great acclaim and won a range of literary prizes.  A number of the authors she worked with now write for Slightly Foxed and continue to enjoy the relationship between editor and author, not always available in publishing today. 

Michael Richardson, educated at Moseley Art School and Birmingham and Bournemouth Colleges of Art, taught art for thirty years in Birmingham secondary schools. In 1988 he devoted his time to painting, and his work has been widely exhibited. When his vision deteriorated, writing a novel provided a fresh creative challenge. He spent long fruitless days producing little more than pages of useless ramblings, but gradually some sort of coherent shape began to emerge. Months later he had a successful eye operation. His novel was advanced enough to want to finish The Pig Bin Tindal Street Press (2000). It won the Sagittarius Award (2001) and, with far more confidence, Michael began Careless Talk (2007). His short stories, poems, and articles have appeared in Sunday Times, Mayfair, Private Eye and London Magazine.

Dominic Riley is a bookbinder, teacher and filmmaker. He first learned bookbinding at 16 from Benedictine Monks at Douai Abbey in Berkshire and later at the London College of Printing. Bindings are taken apart and repaired at every stage, from removing and restoring old leather covers to cleaning and washing damaged paper and reproducing missing text pages. Dominic has worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and for various binderies in London, New York and San Francisco, and spends part of the year teaching across the USA. He has his bindery in the Lake District, from where he travels across the UK teaching master classes and lecturing. He is Vice Chairman of the Society of Bookbinders and was elected a Fellow of Designer Bookbinders in 2008. His binding work is mostly the restoration of antiquarian books and Design Bindings. He has won many prizes in the Designer Bookbinders competition, including both first prizes and the Mansfield Silver Medal in 2007. His bindings are in collections worldwide, including the British Library and the John Rylands Library in Manchester. He has recently completed a two-hour film about the life and work of England’s most famous bookbinder, Bernard Middleton.

John Robinson has had a varied employment history as a tripe-dresser, kiln-maker, local government officer, and truck driver. He also claims to have shovelled much of the concrete on the M62 and played trombone in Hull's no.1 soul band. (Not at the same time) Before 2001 he had preferred to read his work to live audiences and this has had a considerable influence on his style. Ragged Raven published his first collection THE COOKS WEDDING (2001) is his first collection. 

 

I especially like the vim, the large-heartedness, the celebration of life and locality… a masterpiece of fantasy and 'joie de vivre’. U A Fanthorpe  

 

The human, the everyday, is explored, from the celebrating of life in the Greek islands to introducing his son to a blind friend in Equal Opportunities… imagination and attention to detail working together to superb effect…" (Francis Thompson The Journal)  

…if you’re into vivid, real vibrant accounts of people, places, idiosyncracies, drunken nonsense, friendship, couplings and divorce – then John Robinson is your man." (Andrew Detheridge Dial 174)

Lindsay was born in London and studied in Liverpool, before becoming a lecturer in English. She taught at Evesham and Malvern Hills College for a number of years, before leaving full-time teaching in 2005 to take an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and to concentrate on her writing.

 

Her short stories have been successful in competitions. 'The Magic of Stories' was published by Cinnamon Press in September 2009.  

 

'Unravelling' is her first novel to be published.  

 

 

Lindsay lives in Evesham, Worcestershire, where she teaches creative writing.

 

Website: www.lindsaystanberryflynn.co.uk

Hazel Wood, one of the founding co-editors of Slightly Foxed, began her working life on Vogue, and has laboured variously as a reviewer, literary editor, feature writer, ghostwriter, and editor at John Murray.

 

Among publications to which she has contributed are The Times, the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday.

Write to Life is the therapeutic writing group of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Writers from Uganda, Syria, Somalia, Cameroon, Congo, Burundi, Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Kurdistan come together for a workshop every two weeks, and for individual writing with a professional mentor in between. The writing has many purposes: to bear witness on behalf of those who can't, to process and make sense of past experience, to describe in their own words the lives of refugees and asylum seekers in Britain today, and above all, to experience and develop the joyous process of using words and language to build a home from which no government department or landlord can expel them.

 

Website: www.TortureCare.org.uk