Anita Sethi is a British journalist and writer.
Sethi was born in Manchester, England. [1] She has written for The Guardian, The Observer, [2] The Sunday Times , The Independent , the New Statesman , Granta , and The Times Literary Supplement . In broadcasting, she has appeared as a critic, commentator and presenter on several BBC programmes and is a regular speaker and chair at festivals in the UK and internationally. [3] She has been published in anthologies including 'The Wild Isles', 'Women on Nature', and 'Way Makers'. She was an International Writer in Residence [4] at the Emerging Writers' Festival in Melbourne, Australia. She has been a Judge of the Women's Prize for Fiction [5] , British Book Awards, and Costa Book Awards. She has been a tutor at Manchester Metropolitan University's Writing School. [6]
Sethi is the author of the memoir I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain, published in 2021. [7] [8] In 2021, I Belong Here was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize in the Nature Writing category. [9]
Kamila Shamsie FRSL is a Pakistani and British writer and novelist who is best known for her award-winning novel Home Fire (2017). Named on Granta magazine's list of 20 best young British writers, Shamsie has been described by The New Indian Express as "a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to." She also writes for publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio.
Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean novelist, playwright and filmmaker. Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), which was the first to be published in English by a Black woman from Zimbabwe, was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world. She has won other literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the PEN Pinter Prize. In 2020, her novel This Mournable Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Dangarembga was convicted in a Zimbabwe court of inciting public violence, by displaying, on a public road, a placard asking for reform.
Anita Desai is an Indian novelist and Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature. She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London. Since 2020 she has been a Companion of Literature.
Robert Macfarlane is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Adelle Stripe is an English writer and journalist.
Gwendoline Riley is a British writer.
The Manchester Poetry Prize is a literary award celebrating excellence in creative writing. It was launched by Carol Ann Duffy and The Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2008, and was the first phase of the annual Manchester Writing Competition. Open internationally to writers aged 16 or over, the Manchester Poetry Prize awards a cash prize of £10,000 to the writer of the best portfolio of poems submitted. In addition, during the 2008 and 2010 Prizes, a bursary for study at MMU was awarded to an entrant aged 18–25 as part of the Jeffrey Wainwright Manchester Young Writer of the Year Award. Entrants are asked to submit a portfolio of poetry. The poems can be on any subject but must be new work, not published elsewhere.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is an English author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
The Manchester Fiction Prize is an award for an unpublished short story run by the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. It was established in 2009. With a prize of £10,000, it is one of the richest prizes for a single short story currently running in the UK, second only to the BBC National Short Story Award. Previous winners include Toby Litt, Martin MacInnes, D. W. Wilson, and Leone Ross.
Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean lawyer and writer. She writes in English, though she also draws on Shona, her first language. In 2016, she was named African Literary Person of the Year by Brittle Paper. In 2017 she had a DAAD Artist-in-Residence fellowship in Berlin.
Aminatta Forna is a British writer of Scottish and Sierra Leonean ancestry. Her first book was a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002). Since then she has written four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). In 2021 she published a collection of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. (2021), which was a new genre for her.
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
Mona Arshi is a British poet and novelist. She won the Forward Prize for Poetry, Best First Collection in 2015 for her debut collection, Small Hands. She has also won the Manchester Poetry Prize. Her debut novel, Somebody Loves You, was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize.
Imachibundu Oluwadara Onuzo is a Nigerian novelist. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature.
Raynor Winn is a British long-distance walker and writer. Her first book, The Salt Path, was a Sunday Times bestseller in 2018.
Irenosen Iseghohi Okojie FRSL is a Nigerian-born novelist and short-story writer working in London, England. Her stories incorporate speculative elements and also make use of her West African heritage. Her first novel, Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask Award in 2016, and her story "Grace Jones" won the 2020 Caine Prize for African Writing. Okojie was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) in 2018, and in 2020 was appointed a vice-chair of the RSL.
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
Dara Seamus McAnulty is a naturalist, writer and environmental campaigner from Northern Ireland. He is the youngest ever winner of the RSPB Medal and received the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing in 2020 after being the youngest author to be shortlisted for the award.
Lisa Allen-Agostini is a Trinidadian journalist, editor and writer of fiction, poetry and drama. She is also a stand-up comedian, performing as "Just Lisa".
Carys Davies is a British novelist and short story writer. She has won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Award, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the Royal Society of Literature V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize, and the Society of Authors Olive Cook Short Story award. She has been shortlisted for The Writers' Prize and Scotland's National Book Awards and was runner-up for the McKitterick Prize.