Biographer, academic, musician and BBC broadcaster Kate Kennedy is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford, a presenter for BBC Radio 3, and Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing.  She lectures in music and English at Oxford University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.  She has previously held Research Fellowships at Girton College, Cambridge and in the English Faculty, Cambridge University.

She is interested in developing biographical research both as biography and as performance, writing interdisciplinary biographies, radio documentaries, opera libretti and dramatised recitals. Her biography Dweller in Shadows: Ivor Gurney, poet, composer was published by Princeton University Press in June 2021, and was shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize. Her edited collection with Dame Hermione Lee,  Lives of Houses was published by Princeton in March 2020, (contributors including Julian Barnes, Jenny Uglow and Margaret MacMillan). She is currently writing a biographical memoir focussed around the cello, exploring our relationship with the instrument and its capacity to tell stories about the lives of its players. Cello will be published by Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury in 2023.

Her triple biography and operatic play The Fateful Voyage (2017) dramatizes the stories of Rupert Brooke and composers FS Kelly and William Denis Browne, and blends dance, opera and theatre (starring Alex Jennings). It was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Public Engagement with Research by Oxford University in 2017. 

She is a regular broadcaster and academic consultant to the BBC, and advised the commemorations for the First World War and for International Women’s Day for Radio 3, among other regular projects.

She is also in demand as a public lecturer and interviewer, appearing regularly at the Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre and Southbank Centre with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Berkeley Ensemble and Britten Sinfonia.

www.drkatekennedy.com

Sally Bayley is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University where she teaches academic and creative writing. She also teaches as a College Lecturer in English, Film & Creative Writing at Hertford, for the Sarah Lawrence programme at Wadham College, Oxford, and on the ReLit Charity Summer School. She has written widely on the life and artistic legacy of Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. Her publications include a study of the American home, Home on the Horizon: America’s Search for Space (Peter Lang, 2010) and a study of the diary as an art form, The Private Life of the Diary: from Pepys to Tweets (Unbound, 2016). She is now completing a series of three books which explore a child’s escape into literature as a form of retreat in the face of difficult social circumstances. The first, Girl with Dove: a Life Built by Books (William Collins, 2018) was Radio 4’s Book of the Week in January 2019, and a Spectator Book of the Year (2018). Girl with Dove is now part of the A’ Level coursework syllabus. The second illustrated part, No Boys Play Here, will be published June 11, 2020, and will tell the story of the same young girl in search of a lost father and uncle through Shakespeare’s characters.

Tony Gray completed his DPhil at Wolfson College Oxford in Philosophical Theology before entering the publishing industry.

Through his company Words by Design, Tony has worked on over a hundred private biographies (clients have included a polar explorer, a chimney sweep, peers of the realm, WWII POWs, CEOs of multi-nationals, hoteliers, teachers, missionaries, pilots and builders); researched and written a number of significant family histories (including histories of the Schwarzschild, Hajduska, Howarth and Quarmby families); and acted as a consultant for other publishing companies (helping set up and establish private presses and small independent publishers).

His research interests include theology of religions (his best-selling book was a cartoon guide to the basics of theology), family history (especially his own, where he has so far completed two out of a seven-volume series), human rights (having worked on edited collections such as Maternal Mortality and Human Rights and Contemporary Human Rights Challenges), and the histories of buildings (in particular the histories of small churches and their congregations, having so far worked on the histories of Chipping Norton Baptist Church, Stow-on-the-Wold Methodist Church, and Lydney Baptist Church).

Dr Charlie Lee-Potter is a writer, broadcaster, artist and academic. She’s presented current affairs and arts programmes for BBC television and radio and, as a news correspondent, reported from all over the world. She writes non-fiction about landscape and the act of walking, as well as about art and ideas. Her recent book chapters for These Islands: A Portrait of the British Isles focused on the idea of walking the city in specific shapes; the chapter on Bath took the form of a spiral walk around the city’s hills; for the section on London she walked in a giant circle around the city’s Royal parks, and in Edinburgh she took a free-form rectilinear walk using the lines on her childhood tartan scarf as her sole guide.

Charlie is a College Lecturer in English Literature for Visiting Students at Hertford College, Oxford where she teaches Victorian and contemporary literature. Her recent book, Writing the 9/11 Decade: Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel, which analysed the ways writers, artists and musicians responded to the 9/11 attacks, was shortlisted for the University English Book Prize. She is an artist and printmaker and is currently working on a series of etchings and lithographs which attempt to capture the idea of frozen time.

Abrams is an award-winning author and journalist and a lecturer in creative writing at Oxford University. She is a long-standing tutor on the Oxford Masters in Creative Writing and a writing mentor for the Oxford Centre for Life Writing. From 2017-2020 she was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Brasenose College. She is the author of seven works of fiction and non-fiction and three edited volumes. Her debut novel, Touching Distance was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize for Literature and won the MJA Open Book Award for Medical Fiction. Her 2022 biography, Licoricia of Winchester: Power and Prejudice in Medieval England (2022) was described as "totally fascinating, tragic and unforgettable." Other publications include The Jewish Journey: 4000 years in 22 objects (2017) and Jewish Treasures From Oxford Libraries (2020) which was long-listed for the 2021 Wingate Literary Prize. She also writes for the stage and her most recent play All of Us, a revisioning of Sophocles' Electra, premiered in New Zealand in 2023. She is the recipient of an Amnesty International Award for Journalism and a regular literary critic for the Financial Times.

Rebecca Gowers has written two novels, When to Walk, and The Twisted Heart, both longlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). She became the fourth editor to revise Plain Words, the classic usage guide by her great-grandfather Sir Ernest Gowers, and afterwards wrote her own satirical companion volume, Horrible Words, both titles published by Penguin. She has also written two works of biographical non-fiction, both inspired by family archive materials. Each is focussed on a Victorian murder case that happened to involve one of her forebears. The first, The Swamp of Death, was shortlisted for a Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger award; the second, The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns and his Pitiless Killing by the Photographer Eadweard Muybridge, was shortlisted for a Historical Writers’ Association Golden Crown award. She has many years of experience, within Oxford University and outside it, as a teacher of creative writing and non-fiction writing.

Alice is a music historian and author of fiction. Her academic work focuses on British music history and collectors of music and musical instruments; her fiction writing has resulted in five published collections of short fiction, as well as individual short stories published in various anthologies.

She is Associate Writer in Residence at Wytham Woods, runs Didcot Writers, and co-ordinates the Oxfordshire group for the Society of Authors. Alice regularly runs writing retreats and courses, and works with undergraduates and other students to develop their creative writing.

As a mentor, Alice is particularly interested to work with those looking to learn about storytelling, develop characters in their work, or to look at the structural aspects of a narrative.

alicelittle.co.uk/

Anna Beer, a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford University, is an established life-writer with a series of major books to her name. She has many years of experience working with writers at various stages of their careers to take their work to the next level, most recently directing and teaching for the University of Oxford’s Creative Writing MSt, where she was the specialist non-fiction tutor.

Anna has published biographies of major literary figures, John Milton and William Shakespeare among them, but her particular interest as a writer remains the relationship between creativity and gender. Her Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, shortlisted for the RPS Creative Communication award in 2017, continues to generate other work, whether on stage, radio or television.

Anna Beer’s latest book, published in 2022, is Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature, and is her most ambitious, wide-ranging and (perhaps) controversial book to date. She is currently exploring some new literary avenues and is delighted at the thought of working with other writers on their own creative journey.

Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of five poetry collections, including Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems (a PBS Special Commendation); a memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, Waterstones Book Club Choice); a monograph on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, which was placed on the list of essential books for writers by Poets and Writers; and a book of essays on politics and poetics, Poetry and the Language of Oppression. She was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, and taught at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland and at the University of Oxford, while she was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College. She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University. Her work was translated into Italian, Swedish, and Polish. She teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan and occasionally at the Poetry School in London and the Geneva Writers Workshop. Her book of poems about the pandemic, Time Being, will be published this March.

Andrew Naughtie is a journalist, writer and editor. He previously covered American politics for The Independent during the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 election and the first half of the Biden administration. He spent five years as an editor at The Conversation, commissioning news pieces and features from academic experts across disciplines including political science, international relations, sociology and history. He has edited trade books on postcolonial African politics and the decline of Britain as a world power between 1945 and the Brexit referendum.

As a social science graduate of the University of Bristol and University of Chicago, Andrew also has experience across ethnographic fieldwork, survey research and experimental behavioural economics. He has co-created an award-winning sitcom podcast, Dear Bastard, and is currently working on a book about the position of epilepsy in contemporary British culture and the experience of being treated for it.

Dr Catherine Coldstream is a writer, musician, and former contemplative nun with degrees from Oxford, UEA, and London, Goldsmiths. She is the author of poems, interlinked personal essays, and of Cloistered: My Years as a Nun (Chatto & Windus, 2024) an account of her twelve years as a ‘hermit in community’.

She is currently editing William Coldstream Remembered: Portraits of a Painter (Sansom & Company, 2025) – a widely-sourced anthology of essays about her father – while working on a new memoir evoking an eccentric London childhood. An associate editor of MONK arts magazine, she has taught viola and piano peripatetically, theology in schools, and is in demand both as interviewer and speaker.

Norma Clarke is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, London. Over a long career she has published in a wide variety of genres: fiction, biography, literary history, cultural history and memoir. She specialised in the history of women’s writing, beginning with Ambitious Heights, and going on to Dr Johnson’s Women, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, and Queen of the Wits: a Life of Laetitia Pilkington. One book always led to another. Dublin-born Laetitia Pilkington’s experiences in London in the 1740s encouraged an interest in the Irish in London more generally, and Irish writers in particular, out of which grew Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street.

Writing for children was an early ambition. Patrick in Person was followed by Patrick and the Rotten Roman Rubbish, Theo’s Time and several more. The experience of being a children’s author, visiting schools and so on, fed into an academic interest in the history of children’s literature as well as underpinning the mentoring of students choosing to write for children in Creative Writing modules. She has also mentored numerous students writing memoirs, non-fiction and fiction of every kind.

The current project is a continuation of her family memoir Not Speaking (working title, 40 Weymouth Street). She reviews regularly for the TLS and Literary Review as well as contributing to other journals. She can be heard on the TLS podcasts enthusing about books and exhibitions. One podcast, on the Italian Renaissance painter Lavinia Fontana, was recorded from a handsome room in Castello di Galbino, the OCLW writing retreat in Tuscany (June 16, 2023). The timing was fortuitous but the location – close to Bologna where Lavinia Fontana worked – made it sweet.on goes here

Caitlin Stobie is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds. She has previously held Wellcome-funded fellowships at the University of Leeds and the University of Oxford, and she supervises creative projects by medical students at Oxford. She is the author of three books and is currently completing her first novel, funded by an Authors' Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors. 

 Thin Slices, her debut poetry collection, was partly inspired by a collaboration with scientists developing artificial cells. It has been shortlisted for the Ingrid Jonker Prize for English Poetry, the Melita Hume Poetry Prize, and the Rædleaf International Poetry Award. She is also interested in writing on the environment and medicine: her monograph, Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2023 University English Book Prize. She is co-author of a short story collection with Kharys Ateh Laue titled The Smell of Blood and Other Stories. 

Caitlin is interested in developing literary narratives on ethical questions. Her first three books focus on bioethics, inspired partly from working at the University of Oxford's Ethox Centre. More recently, Caitlin's fiction writing has focused on plagiarism, authenticity, and AI. 

She makes regular appearances at literary festivals in the UK and South Africa. Her commissioned writing has appeared at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens, Hidden Door Festival, Gulp Fiction in Oxford, London's Vagina Museum, and elsewhere. She is part of the editorial team at Stand magazine. 

Sophia is the author of five books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent book, The Poetry Writers’ Handbook, was published by Bloomsbury in 2022. Sophia has delivered several writing and publishing workshops for Bloomsbury, and has been one of the editors of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook for over ten years.

As an editor, Sophia has worked with over fifty authors and edited books that went on to be published by Penguin, Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press, Duke University Press and Unbound. Sophia has lectured on writing, publishing and events for Falmouth University, University College London and Oxford University Faculty of Continuing Education.

When not writing or editing, Sophia makes work that explores the intersections between spoken word, theatre, music and radio. She is a presenter and producer on London station Resonance FM and The Polari Prize Podcast, and has featured on BBC and Virgin Radio.

In addition to a twenty-year publishing career, Sophia has been a featured poet five times at Glastonbury Festival. In 2023, her electronica-backed poem The Beau Monde was commissioned for the Crown to Couture exhibition at Kensington Palace. She is currently working on her second novel.