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.
Courttia Newland is a British writer of Jamaican and Barbadian heritage.
City Lit is an adult education college in Holborn, central London, founded by the London County Council in 1919, which has charitable status. It offers part-time courses across four schools and five "centres of expertise", covering humanities and sciences, languages, performing arts, visual arts, deaf education, family learning, community outreach, learning disabilities education, speech therapy and universal skills.
Sarah Hall is an English novelist and short story writer. Her critically acclaimed second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was nominated for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. She lives in Cumbria.
Elise Valmorbida is an Italian Australian writer and creative writing tutor who lives in London, England.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo, is a British 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 woman with Black heritage 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 person with Black heritage to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Ivan E. Coyote is a Canadian spoken word performer, writer, and LGBT advocate. Coyote has won many accolades for their collections of short stories, novels, and films. They also visit schools to tell stories and give writing workshops. The CBC has called Coyote a "gender-bending author who loves telling stories and performing in front of a live audience." Coyote is non-binary and uses singular they pronouns. Many of Coyote's stories are about gender, identity, and social justice. Coyote currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Monique Roffey, FRSL, is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
Marina Salandy-Brown FRSA, Hon. FRSL, is a Trinidadian journalist, broadcaster and cultural activist. She was formerly an editor and Senior Manager in Radio and News and Current Affairs programmes with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London, one of the BBC's few top executives from an ethnic minority background. She is the founder and inaugural director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, held annually in Trinidad and Tobago since 2011, "the biggest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean", and of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She was also co-founder of the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize.
The NGC Bocas Lit Fest is the Trinidad and Tobago literary festival that takes place annually during the last weekend of April in Port of Spain. Inaugurated in 2011, it is the first major literary festival in the southern Caribbean and largest literary festival in the Anglophone Caribbean. A registered non-profit company, the festival has as its title sponsor the National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago (NGC). Other sponsors and partners include First Citizens Bank, One Caribbean Media (OCM), who sponsor the associated OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, CODE, and the Commonwealth Foundation.
Leone Ross is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
Margaret Yvonne Busby,, Hon. FRSL, also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison (1944–2011) co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award.
Media Diversified is a UK-based nonprofit media and advocacy organisation for writers and journalists of colour, founded by filmmaker Samantha Asumadu in 2013. It publishes nonfiction articles by a variety of writers at its website, which is updated several times a week. Although much of Media Diversified's staff are UK-based, its pool of writers and its readership are international. All staff members and writers are people of colour.
Barbara Jenkins is a Trinidadian writer, whose work since 2010 has won several international prizes, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize.
The Bradford Literature Festival is a spoken and written word event that promotes literature and is held for ten days annually over June and July in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. The first event was held in 2014 and was attended by 968 people; by the time of the 2018 event, the attendance had risen to over 70,000. The event is noted for its attendance by minority groups and writers, with over 50% of attendees coming from BAME backgrounds.
Susheila Nasta, MBE, Hon. FRSL, is a British critic, editor, academic and literary activist. She is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures at Queen Mary University of London, and founding editor of Wasafiri, the UK's leading magazine for international contemporary writing. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.
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".
Philip Nanton is a Vincentian writer, poet and spoken-word performer, based in Barbados. A sociologist by training, who also teaches cultural studies, he is Honorary Research Associate at the University of Birmingham, and lectures at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. He has been a contributor on Caribbean culture and literature to journals and magazines such as the Caribbean Review of Books, Shibboleths: a Journal of Theory and Criticism and Caribbean Quarterly, and as a spoken-word artist has performed his work at festivals internationally. In 2012, he represented St. Vincent & the Grenadines at Poetry Parnassus in London.
Ruth Borthwick, Hon. FRSL, is a British arts administrator, literature executive and educator, who for more than three decades has worked with writers in bookselling and publishing, and as an advocate for literature in the UK and internationally. In 2018, she was elected an Honorary Fellow by the Royal Society of Literature, rewarding "significant contribution to the advancement of literature". Formerly chief executive and artistic director of the Arvon Foundation for ten years (2009–2019), she has been Chair of English PEN since 2021.
