After completing her degree at Goldsmiths, Laura Steen taught English in a secondary school in Madrid for two years. She piloted an e-learning scheme called ‘Global Scholars’ which empowered students to create their own digital projects, raising awareness of global issues such as food security and climate change. After completing the Introduction to Therapeutic and…

Sam Blake is a pseudonym for Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, the founder of The Inkwell Group publishing consultancy and the hugely popular national writing resources website Writing.ie. She is Ireland’s leading literary scout who has assisted many award winning and bestselling authors to publication. Vanessa has been writing fiction since her husband set sail across the Atlantic for eight weeks and she…

Asia grew up in London and studied Anthropology at Durham University, after which she started a career in television. She presented and produced lifestyle programmes in Shanghai before moving back to London, where she worked for Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman as Project Manager on their round-the-world motorbike documentaries. She started writing Killing It on maternity leave and…

Born in 1959 in Somerset, Ashley Pharoah is an award-winning writer and series creator. His credits include Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes and The Living and the Dead.

Irenosen Okojie was born in Nigeria and moved to England aged eight. She attended Gresham’s Boarding School in Holt, Norfolk, for several years before becoming a pupil at St Angela’s Convent School in east London. Along the way, she has worked as a freelance writer, Marketing Assistant and Editorial Assistant. She is a currently a freelance…

Originally trained as a teacher in Philosophy, from 1977 until 1988 Stella worked in Kenya where she established a teacher training scheme for the Aga Khan Educational Fund, Geneva. In 1988 she relocated to Denmark.  Stella gave up full-time technical writing and editing almost 4 years ago to concentrate on her creative writing. She worked through the Norwich Writing…

Charlotte is a writer and editor from Chipping Norton, and joined the Committee as ChipLitFest Programme Director having volunteered at the 2016 Festival. Having taught English in South-East Asia and devised curricula for language schools, Charlotte is an active advocate for creative arts and education, acting as content writer for Field Notes and on other digital platforms.…

Simon Nicholls is currently Executive Producer for the Comedy department at BBC Studios. For five years Simon was a producer in Armando Iannucci’s team at the BBC, working across a slate of comedies including The Thick Of It, Time Trumpet, Genius with Dave Gorman and Chris Addison’s sitcom Lab Rats.  At NBC Universal Simon helped develop Christopher Guest’s HBO comedy Family Tree and recent BBC Two comedy Quacks. Simon has…

Richard is ‘one of Britain’s leading cultural commentators’ (The Guardian), a prizewinning writer and bestselling author. He ‘writes entirely without sentimentality and with exquisite tenderness – but his books are underpinned by close research that puts individuals in their wider historical context’ (The Financial Times). Richard also works with businesses from General Motors to Unilever on strategy…

Caroline Ambrose is the founder and organiser of The Bath Novel Award and The Bath Children’s Novel Award, two annual international prizes for emerging novelists. After gaining a BA Hons in English Literature, Language and Social Psychology at the University of Birmingham, she joined The Body Shop International where she worked her way from the shop floor…