Notes on Contributors

Luke Brown is the author of the novels My Biggest Lie (2014), and Theft (2020). He is from Lancashire and lives in London.

Ciaran Buckley lives in London. He has had poetry widely published, including in The Rialto and North.

Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer and founding editor of bath magg. His work has appeared in the New Statesman, Granta and POETRY. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. His debut book of poems, More Sky, was published by Carcanet in January 2023.

Claire Carroll’s short stories and poetry have been published by journals including Gutter Magazine, perverse, Lunate Journal, The Oxonian Review, and Short Fiction Journal. In 2021, her short story ‘My Brain is Boiling with Ideas’ was shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize, and her short story ‘Cephalopod’ was the recipient of the Essex University & Short Fiction Journal Wild Writing Prize.

Caroline Crampton is the author of The Way to the Sea: the Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary and the forthcoming A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria. She makes the Shedunnit podcast for BBC Sounds and her reviews are published in, among others, the Guardian and the Spectator.

Tim Craven is from Stoke-on-Trent and lives in Edinburgh. He has an MFA from Syracuse and a PhD from Edinburgh, which examined the characterisation of mental illness in Confessional Poetry. He received a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust and an Emerging Writer Award from Cove Park. Amongst other journals, Tim’s poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Bath Magg, and his pamphlet, Lake Effect, is published by Tapsalteerie.

Rishi Dastidar’s poetry has been published by the Financial Times, New Scientist and the BBC amongst many others. A poem from his debut collection, Ticker-tape (Nine Arches Press), was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018. A member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, he is also chair of the London writer development organisation Spread The Word. His collection, Saffron Jack (Nine Arches Press, 2020) was included in the Guardian Review’s list of ‘Best recent poetry collections’, May 2020. Neptune’s Projects, his latest collection, was published by Nine Arches Press in April 2023.

Suzi Feay is a London-based literary journalist with a particular interest in fiction and poetry. She writes regularly for the Guardian and the Financial Times, amongst others.

Jane Haynes is co-founder of The Blue Door Practice in London and now prefers to think of herself as a relational therapist. She has strayed from psychoanalysis, incorporating dialogue into her practice.

Lucy Holme is a writer who lives in Cork, Ireland. Her poems feature in The Stinging Fly, Southword, Atrium, Wild Court, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, and Bad Lilies, amongst others and she has poetry forthcoming in The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Wales and Anthropocene. Her debut chapbook, Temporary Stasis, which was shortlisted for The Patrick Kavanagh Award, was published by Broken Sleep Books in August 2022. Her CNF has most recently been published in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and is forthcoming in The Well Review and Banshee. She has just received a distinction in her MA in Creative Writing at University College Cork.

Phoebe Hurst is a writer and journalist from Peterborough. Currently Assistant Editor at the Guardian, she was previously Managing Editor of Vice and has written for publications including the Quietus, Dazed and Wired. She has a short story published in this year’s Aesthetica Creative Writing Award annual and was also longlisted for the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize. She is represented by Imogen Pelham at Marjacq.

Róisín Lanigan is a writer and editor based in Belfast and London. She has previously written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, New Statesman, Prospect, The Fence, and Slate, amongst other publications. Her fiction has appeared in The London Magazine, The Moth, The Tangerine and Honest Ulsterman. She is represented by Kat Aitken at United and has just finished her first novel.

Hilary Mantel was a renowned English writer who twice won the Booker Prize, for her best-selling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won worldwide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). She died at age seventy in 2022.

Graham Mort lives in North Yorkshire and is emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Lancaster University. His latest full collection of poems is Black Shiver Moss (Seren, 2017). A new book of short fiction, Like Fado, appeared from Salt in January 2020 and an illustrated poetry pamphlet (with artist Claire Jefferson) from 4Word in 2021.

Konrad Muller served as an Australian diplomat in Cairo and Tel Aviv, and now works on a small family vineyard in northern Tasmania. His writing has appeared previously in The London Magazine.

Declan O’Driscoll reviews translated fiction regularly for The Irish Times. He has also written reviews for the Dublin Review of Books, the LA Review of Books and the TLS.

Bibhu Padhi has published fourteen full-length collections of poetry. His poems has appeared in magazines such as The Contemporary Review, The New Humanist, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Stand, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Ireland Review, The American Scholar, The New Criterion, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Queen’s Quarterly, New Contrast, Text, Poetry Salzburg Review, Debonair, The Illustrated Weekly of India, and Indian Literature.

Anna Parker is a writer and researcher interested in history, psychology, and objects. She is currently completing a History PhD at Cambridge on material culture, emotion, and families in Renaissance Prague. Her writing has appeared in Vittles, W Journal,

Review31, The Stillpoint Journal and The Arts Desk, and she was a London Library Emerging Writer for 2020-1. Anna’s first book, Cottage, is about her Czech family, their holiday house in the Bohemian forests, and Europe’s twentieth century.

Neil Powell is an award-winning biographer and poet. Among his books are Roy Fuller: Writer and Society (1995), The Language of Jazz (1997), George Crabbe: An English Life (2004), Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations (2008) and Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music (2013) as well as eight collections of poetry, of which the most recent is Was and Is: Collected Poems (2017). He lives in Orford, Suffolk.

Youssef Rakha is the author of the novels The Crocodiles and The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars. He is a bilingual writer and photographer, and the editor of the blog ‘The Sultan’s Seal’ (yrakha.com). Born and based in Cairo, Egypt, he earned a BA in English and philosophy from from the University of Hull, England. He is the cultural editor of Al-Ahram Weekly, the Cairobased English-language newspaper.

Tony Roberts has published five collections of poems. His fifth collection, The Noir American & Other Poems, was published in 2018. His second book of essays on poets, critics and America, The Taste of My Mornings, appeared in 2019. Both are from Shoestring Press.

Ben Short has worked as a charcoal burner and woodsman, based in the West Country. He has appeared in several publications including: Country Living, The Field, BBC Countryfile Magazine and Hole & Corner Magazine. His memoir, Burn: A Story of Fire, Woods and Healing, was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 2022.

Kate Simpson is an editor, poet, and critic. She is the former Associate Editor of Aesthetica, and has independently edited titles for Faber, Valley Press, and Ambit. Her 2021 anthology, Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency, was a Guardian Book of the Year and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She is currently based at the University of Leeds’ Poetry Centre as a Leverhulme-funded researcher exploring deep time poetics. Her writing has appeared in the TLS, The Telegraph, Poetry Review, Poetry London, and PN Review, amongst others.

Christiana Spens is a writer and artist based in London, with a background in academia. She has published several books in the past, including Shooting Hipsters (Repeater Books, 2016), The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and The Fear (Repeater Books, March 2023). She has written for Glamour, Stylist, LitHub, The Irish Times, Architectural Design, Byline Times, Art Quarterly, Prospect, Aeon + Psyche, Flux, Dazed & Confused, The Quietus and Studio International.

Dan Sperrin is a lecturer in English at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. He is a cartoonist for The London Magazine and with David Westnedge Co. Cartoons has exhibited around the world. He has just finished a PhD on Jonathan Swift at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and is now writing a book on the history of satire.

Jean Sprackland is a poet and writer. She is the winner of the Costa Poetry Award in 2008, and the Portico Prize for Non-Fiction in 2012. Her books have also been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the TS Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Award.

Guy Stagg grew up in Paris, Heidelberg, Yorkshire and London. The Crossway is his first book and is an account of his ten-month walk to Jerusalem. It was shortlisted for the inaugural DRF Award in 2016 and since then has won the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019, as well as being shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019, the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019 and the Somerset Maugham Award 2019. The Crossway was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Rosamund Taylor won The London Magazine Poetry Prize in December 2020, for her poem ‘The Proof’. Her collection, In Her Jaws, was published by Banshee Press in 2022. In March 2022, She won third place for the MsLexia Women’s Poetry Com- petition, with her poem, ‘Painting the Last Glacier’, and in 2017, she won the Mairtín Crawford Award for a selection of twelve poems. Her work has also appeared in such magazines as Banshee, Butcher’s Dog, Fourteen Poems, The Rialto and Poetry Ireland Review, as well as in anthologies such as Out of Time: Poetry for the Climate Emergency, published by Valley Press, and Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry, by The Lifeboat Press. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Poetry Please’ and RTE’s ‘The Po- etry Programme’.

Alice White is an American poet who lives in rural France. Her writing has received support from the Hawthornden Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and AWP Writer to Writer. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, North American Review, and berlin lit.

Jay Whittaker is an Edinburgh-based poet. She has published two poetry collections with Cinnamon Press: Sweet Anaesthetist (2020) and Wristwatch, which won Poetry Book of the Year in Scotland’s National Book Awards 2018. She is widely published and her work has featured in Poetry Review, The Scotsman, The North, Butcher’s Dog, The Rialto, and the Bloodaxe anthology Staying Human.