Notes on Contributors

Haleh Agar is Iranian-Canadian but has been living in London for the past five years. She was a teacher for over seven years, working at international schools around the world. She has fiction and narrative non-fiction published in a number of magazines and journals including Mslexia and The National Association of Writers in Education. She has recently won the Brighton Prize for her short fiction piece JELLYFISH and has recently completed her debut novel which was shortlisted by Penguin Random House’s ‘Write Now’ scheme. While working on her second novel, Haleh is learning to knit her first pair of socks.

Bruce Anderson is primarily a political columnist who has contributed to numerous publications. He is the author of a biography of John Major.

Sharon Black is originally from Glasgow where she worked as a journalist but now lives in the Cévennes mountains of France where she organises writing retreats (www.abricreativewriting.com). Her poetry has been published widely and she has written two collections: To

Know Bedrock (Pindrop Press, 2011) and The Art of Egg (Two Ravens Press, 2015). www. sharonblack.co.uk

Peter Davies is a journalist and literary critic whose publications from Greenwich Exchange press include studies on Milton’s Paradise Lost, William Blake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Max Dunbar lives in West Yorkshire. He blogs at http://maxdunbar.wordpress.com/ and tweets at http://twitter.com/MaxDunbar1.

Rebecca Farmer was born in Birmingham and both her parents came from Dublin. Her pamphlet ‘Not Really’ was a winner in the 2013/14 Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition judged by Carol Ann Duffy. She has recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths and she is currently working on her first collection.

Geoffrey Heptonstall’s most recent publications are the paperback edition of a novel, Heaven’s Invention, and stories for Bandit Fiction, Between the Lines and Scarlet Leaf Review. A play, Out of the Night, was published in Sentinel Literary Review in the autumn of 2017. Recent poetry appears in the High Window, Penwood Review and Poetry Pacific.

Jennifer Johnson completed the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London last year. She writes short stories, essays, and has recently completed a novel. She has lived in London for most of her life.

Theophilus Kwek has published five volumes of poetry, most recently The First Five Storms (2017) which won the New Poets’ Prize. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in

The Guardian, EuropeNow, The Irish Examiner, the Asia Literary Review, and elsewhere. He serves as Editor of Oxford Poetry.

Alistair Lexden is a Conservative peer and historian who has published a number of books and articles in journals on 19th and 20th century political history. His work this year will include a study of Disraeli’s first premiership to mark its 150th anniversary, and a reassessment of Neville Chamberlain’s career for a lecture on the 80th anniversary of Munich. Full details of his historical work, and of his contributions in the Lords of which he is a Deputy Speaker, can be found on his website,htpp://www.alistairlexden.org.uk. Thirty-three of Jeffrey Meyers’s books have been translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. In 2012 he gave the Seymour lectures on biography at the National Libraries of Australia. He’s recently published Remembering Iris Murdoch in 2013, Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes in 2014, Robert Lowell in Love and The

Mystery of the Real: Correspondence with Alex Colville in 2016. Leonard Quart: Professor Emeritus of Cinema— CUNY and COSI; Contributing Editor, Cineaste; co-author of American Film and Society Since 1945 (5th Edition (Praeger) will be out in 2018) , and The Films of Mike Leigh (Cambridge University Press). Writer of innumerable essays and reviews of film and other subjects for magazines like Dissent, Film Quarterly,

London Magazine, and Logos. Columnist for the Berkshire Eagle. Fiona Sampson’s latest books are Limestone Country (Little Toller) and In Search of Mary Shelley (Profile). Peter Slater is an English teacher. This is his first essay to appear in print but he has published over two dozen short stories and poems in various magazines and journals. Arthur Solway’s poetry and essays have most recently appeared in Tri-Quarterly, The Antioch Review, BOMB, The Rialto, The Manhattanville Review and Salmagundi, with forthcoming poems in The Tupelo Quarterly. He is a frequent contributor of critical reviews and cultural essays to Artforum, Frieze, and Art Asia Pacific magazines. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, he has been based in Shanghai since 2007. This is his first appearance in The London Magazine. John Spurling is a playwright and novelist, author of MacRune’s Guevara, The British Em

pire, Part One, After Zenda and A Book of Liszts. His fourth novel, The Ten Thousand Things, was published by Overlook/Duckworth in 2014 and won the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Arcadian Nights: Greek Myths Re-imagined was published by Duckworth in 2015 and by Overlook in the USA in 2016.

Will Stone is a poet, essayist and literary translator. Shearsman Books have recently reissued his poetry collections in new editions and published his third The Sleepwalkers in March 2016. His translations with Arc, Menard and Hesperus include works by Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Trakl, Rilke, Nerval and Roth. Pushkin Press published his Stefan Zweig Montaigne in August 2015 and Zweig’s 1930’s essays as Messages from a Lost World in January 2016. His

Selected Poems of Georges Rodenbach will be published by Arc in 2017 and an expanded collection of the poetry of Georg Trakl by Seagull Books in 2017. Will also contributes to Poetry

Review, The TLS and Apollo magazine. Eoghan Walls is an Irish poet. Educated in Wales and Ireland, he has since lived in Rwanda, Germany and Scotland. He won an Eric GregoryAward in 2006, and has been shortlisted and highly commended in many other prizes, including the Manchester Poetry Prize, The Bridport Prize and the Wigtown International Poetry Prize. His first collection, The Salt Harvest (Seren 2011) was shortlisted for the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award for Best First Collection. Currently he lives in Lancaster with his wife and daughters, where he lectures on Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

Mark Wilkins, Husband, Father and Intellectual Property Lawyer based in Southern Europe. He’s involved in property and music/tech funding and realising the full potential of - www. aestheticons.com - a curation and celebration of iconic designs.