KATE BEALES is a writer and theatre
maker.
She began her career at the National Theatre of Germany in Hamburg, toured with the English Shakespeare Company and was Community Director at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. As a Senior Artist and practitioner with NT Learning, Kate creates and facilitates theatre projects supporting learning and literacy across the UK.
She is an Associate Artist with Project Phakama, where she has worked with refugees on the streets of Paris and Athens, collaborating with a photographer to build pop-up darkrooms and pinhole cameras for community storytelling projects. At The Drive Project, she supports limbless veterans to tell their stories of resilience. She was Director of Theatre for TDP’s award-winning Bravo 22 company, directing and curating online writing and performance projects for wounded ex-servicemen and women.
She devises improv and voice workshops for writers and storytellers, and creates writing and performance projects for theatres, and arts organisations nationwide. She spent two decades as a lecturer in Storytelling and Shakespeare Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (London) and she teaches storytelling to senior executives worldwide. She holds MA degrees in English Literature and Art History, and an MSc in Conflict Resolution and Mediation Studies. She is a trained community mediator and conflict coach.
She is currently completing her first novel, The Gosling and the Carancho, set in southern Patagonia in 1921.
CONOR GLYNN is an Irish novelist, who is currently working as nurse in Saudi Arabia. He is currently completing Shally Peckles, a novel about a young woman with Downs Syndrome partly inspired by his own family’s experiences.
REBECCA MONKS is an author, playwright, poet and journalist. Born in Warrington and now based in Edinburgh, she works for Creative Scotland. She has been a journalist for Scotland on Sunday, The Scotsman and The List, and a freelancer for BBC Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, The i and Skyscanner. Two of her plays, Scour and Tyke, have featured at the Edinburgh Festival; the latter transferred to London’s West End. She regularly reads her poetry and short stories at spoken word events and literary festivals. She is working on a novel set in the art scene of 1950s New York and 1990s manchester, provisionally entitled Moving Day.
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SALLY J MORGAN was born in Abertyleri, South Wales, and grew up in various towns in Wales and England. She studied art in England, Belgium and Germany, and has an MA in History gained at Ruskin College, and a PhD from Deakin University in Melbourne. She spent a number of years as a community artist in deprived areas of Newcastle, Salford and inner London before becoming an academic, lecturing at various art schools. She has exhibited across the world as an artist and has published chapters and articles on popular culture. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand with her wife, the Costa Book Awards-shortlisted author, Jess Richards.
Her debut novel, Toto Among the Murderers (“a poetic and dreamy literary read that glides along a dangerously taut guitar string” – South Africa Sunday Times) set in the north of England in the 1970s, was published by John Murray Originals in 2020. It was selected as Indie Fiction Book of the Month and then won the 2022 Portico Prize , as well as being longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
She is currently working on her next novel, set in Salford in the early eighties. It is loosely based on her experiences of working and living on a hard housing estate full of bright people at odds with the law. Some of the teenagers she got close to became notorious gangland criminals in Manchester in later life.
DEVIKA PONNAMBALAM is a Directing graduate of the National Film and Television School. She has made a number of short films and has also directed for mainstream TV. She gained an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.
Her first novel, I Am Not Your Eve, was published by Bluemoose Books in 2022. It tells the story of Teha’amana, Paul Gauguin’s first Tahitian muse, from the point of view of the girl and the island that inspired his masterpiece Manao Tupapau/The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch. It was shortlisted for the Saltaire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
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MARK THWAITE is a writer (and consultant in digital marketing) living in the North West of England. Mark set up the ReadySteadyBook.com literary website in 2003 and it quickly became what The Times newspaper called “One of the best places on the web for clever, wise, sparky book-related discussions and reviews”. It was also named as one of the Guardian‘s top 10 literary blogs. Mark was named as one of the Hospital Club 100 – a list of the most influential people in the creative industries – in both 2008 and 2009, and was also listed as one of The Bookseller‘s 100 most influential people of 2009. In 2015, he was named as a Bookseller Rising Star. His writing has appeared in, amongst other places, the TLS, The Bookseller, Ink, CrimeTime, PN Review, all the ‘broadsheets’ and, of course, on the now retired ReadySteadyBook website. Mark sits on the Board of the award-winning poetry press Carcanet as a non-executive director and is also a Trustee of the Dukes theatre in Lancaster. He is currently completing a novel, My Father, The Author.
NICOLA WILLIAMS lives in London. After 16 years as a barrister specialising in criminal law, she joined the board of the Police Complaints Authority in 2001, before being appointed as a Commissioner at the Independent Police Complaints Commission. After other senior roles at the Ministry of Defence, she was appointed as Service Complaints Ombudsman for the Armed Forces in 2016.
Her debut novel, Without Prejudice, was published by Headline in 1997. Praised for its authentic depiction of the hostility of the British legal system, it was described as “highly charged and fast-paced” by the Irish Times and “original, pacy, and multi-layered” by the Guardian. It was republished by Penguin in 2021 as part of Black Britain: Writing Back, a series of overlooked black British writers curated by Booker Prize winner Bernadine Evaristo. Screen rights have been optioned by Studio Lambert. Two further books in the series have been signed by Hamish Hamilton (the first thrillers they have published since Raymond Chandler): Until Proven Innocent was published in 2023, with The Diary due in spring 2024.
