Courttia Newland is the author of seven works of fiction that include his debut, The Scholar. His latest novel, The Gospel According to Cane, was published in 2013 and has been optioned by Cowboy Films. He was nominated for the Impac Dublin Literary Award, The Frank O’ Conner award, The CWA Dagger in the Library Award, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and The Theatre 503 Award for playwriting as well as numerous others. His short stories have appeared in many anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2016 her was awarded the Tayner Barbers Award for science fiction writing and the Roland Rees Busary for playwriting. He is associate lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster and is completing a PhD in creative writing. Photo Credit: Sharmila-Chauhan

Dr Mpalive-Hangson Msiska is a Reader in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, with special interest in Post-colonial and Global Literatures.  He has written widely on African and Post-colonial Literatures, including the following books: Post-colonial Identity in Wole Soyinka (2007) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (2007) (co-authored).  He has been a judge for the Caine Prize for African Writing as well as the Brunel University African Poetry Prize.  He sits on the Boards of the Royal African Society, The Canon Collins Education and Legal Trust and The British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Nicky Harman is co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors) and translates Chinese literature (and some non-fiction and poetry) into English. Her authors include Chen Xiwo, Han Dong, Hong Ying, Dorothy Tse, Xinran, Yan Geling and Zhang Ling. She mentors new translators, teaches summer schools, and judges translation competitions. She works with others on the literary website Paper Republic (paper-republic.org), writes blogs and runs events to promote Chinese literature in English, in collaboration with the London Free Word Centre, Southbank Centre and the Writing Chinese project (Leeds University). She tweets as @cfbcuk and @NickyHarman_cn. She is based in Weymouth, UK.

Vona Groarke has published seven collections of poetry with Gallery Press, the most recent being X (2014) and Selected Poems, reviewed in The Dublin Review of Books as a collection ‘of almost sublime purity’ and awarded the Pigott Prize for the best book of poetry by an Irish poet in 2016. Described in the Irish Times as ‘intriguing… erudite and elegant’, her book-length essay on art-frames, Four Sides Full, was also published in 2016 and was the Book on One on RTE Radio. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The New York Review of Books and The Threepenny Review. A former editor of Poetry Ireland Review and Selector for the Poetry Book Society, she is a Senior Lecturer in poetry at the University of Manchester.  She was the 2017 inductee into the Irish Literary Hall of Fame, and has been a member of  Aosdána since 2010.

Xiaolu Guo is an award winning novelist and film director. She has published a dozen books with Random House. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize), and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her nonfiction Radical was published by Vintage 2023, followed by My Battle of Hastings. Her 2025 novel Call Me Ishmaelle is a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick. Named as a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelist, she also directed several feature films including the Golden Leopard Winner of her feature She, a Chinese and MoMA New Directors’ selection We Went to Wonderland. Her new non-fiction Everyday Tang will be published by The New York Review of Books in 2026. Guo has been a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, and a Fischer Professor at the Free University in Berlin. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.