Our Mentors

Select a region below or scroll to see mentors across the UK:

• ENGLAND – SOUTH	• ENGLAND – MIDLANDS	• ENGLAND – NORTH
• SCOTLAND	• WALES	• NORTHERN IRELAND

 

Mentors with this symbol are also
available for manuscript assessment

All mentors are available for mentoring in person and via videocall. If there is no mentor available near your location and you do not wish to meet by videocall, please feel free to contact us (studio@ruppinagency.com) as we may be able to find a suitable mentor closer to you.

 

EMMA CLAIRE SWEENEY – WRITERS’ STUDIO DIRECTOR

As the Director of the Writer’s Studio, Emma is responsible for ensuring writers are matched with suitable mentors, and she heads up the selection process for places on the Full Mentoring & Editing Programme. She is also available as a mentor herself (see entry below), in London and Hertfordshire or via videocall.
     Emma is a central academic at the Open University, where she chairs and designs undergraduate and post-graduate creative writing courses. She was formerly Director of Professional Tutoring at New York University – London, and she co-founded City University of London’s year-long novel-writing course. She has a great deal of experience managing and mentoring colleagues, and has planned, co-ordinated and delivered salon series, workshop programmes and writing residencies.
     An award-winning writer herself, Emma has published Owl Song at Dawn (Legend Press 2016), a novel set in Morecambe and inspired by her autistic sister, and A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendship of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf (Aurum/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2017), co-written with Emily Midorikawa and featuring a foreward by Margaret Atwood. She is currently working on a new novel.

ENGLAND – SOUTH

EVE AINSWORTH is a working class author who has written for both adults and children (both middle grade and young adult). Her adult novel Duckling (2022) was published by Penguin Random House and she has published 17 other titles for younger readers. Her books have been translated into other languages and have been nominated for prestigious national awards including the Carnegie and the UKLA Book Awards.
    Eve has vast experience working as a public speaker and creative workshop coordinator for schools, libraries and other events both nationally and internationally. She also is an experienced mentor and is very passionate about helping those from disadvantaged backgrounds. She has worked with organisations such as New Writing South and Creative Ink to support and develop future writers from all ages. 

• Areas of expertise: commercial women’s fiction, young adult, middle grade
• Location: Crawley, West Sussex
• Possible meeting places: Crawley Library, Horsham Cafe on the Park
  Eve’s website; Eve is also on Twitter

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction; short stories; narrative non-fiction
  
• Location: Truro & Falmouth (Cornwall)
  
• Possible meeting places: Hall for Cornwall café (Truro); Falmouth Public Library
  Wyl is on Twitter

CATHERINE MENON is the author of Fragile Monsters, published in 2021 by Viking. Her debut short story collection, Subjunctive Moods, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018. She has a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in creative writing from City University, for which she won the annual prize. She has led a number of workshops and tutorials, including workshops for Spread The Word, the Northern Short Story Festival, the Leicester Writes festival and the LSE Literature Festival.
    Catherine has won or been placed in a number of competitions, including the Fish, Bridport, London Short Story, Bare Fiction, Willesden Herald, Asian Writer, Leicester Writes, Winchester Writers Festival and Short Fiction Journal awards. Her work has been published in a number of literary journals, including The Good Journal and Asian Literary Review and has been broadcast on radio. She’s been a judge for several international short fiction competitions, including the Cambridge Short Story Prize, Leicester Writes and Hysteria competitions.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction; short stories
• Location: north London
• Possible meeting place: Finsbury Park Theatre Cafe
• Catherine is on Twitter

SO MEYER is a writer, editor and bookseller. Their recent books include queer SFF Unreal Sex (co-edited with Adam Zmith, Cipher, 2021), essay A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020), poetry chapbook jacked a kaddish (Litmus, 2018) and cultural history Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015), as well as contributions to The Film We Can’t See (BBC Sounds, 2022, produced by Adam Zmith), Altered States (Ignota, 2021), On Relationships (3ofCups, 2021), At the Pond (Daunt, 2019), Not that Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (Atlantic, 2018) and Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota, 2018). Their collection Truth & Darepublished by Cipher in 2023.
    So works part-time as a bookseller at Burley Fisher Books, where they produce BFDay, the shop’s biannual literary festival. They are part of queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes, editing the collective’s web magazine Culture Club.

• Areas of expertise: poetry; creative and critical non-fiction: essay and long form; speculative fiction: short and long form
• Location: London
• Possible meeting places: Burley Fisher Books; Haggerston; British Library
  So is on Twitter

EMILY MIDORIKAWA is the author of A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf, co-written with Emma Claire Sweeney and with a foreword by Margaret Atwood. The book is published by Aurum Press in the UK and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the USA. (Emma and Emily also ran the blog Something Rhymed, which celebrates female literary friendship.) Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice was published by Counteerpoint Press in 2021.
     A graduate of UEA’s Creative Writing MA (Prose Fiction), Emily has since held positions teaching writing at the University of Cambridge, City University of London and the Open University. She currently teaches at New York University’s London campus.
     Emily is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. Her short fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in, among others, Aesthetica, Mslexia and the Good Journal. Her journalism has been published in the likes of the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Paris Review and the Washington Post.

• Areas of expertise: narrative non-fiction; novel; short fiction
• Location: London
• Possible meeting place: British Library
  Emily’s website; Emily is also on Twitter and Instagram
  

SAM MILLS graduated from Oxford University with a BA in English Language and Literature. Since then, she has been a full-time writer. In 2012, Corsair published her debut novel for adults, The Quiddity of Will Self, a quirky literary novel about sex, death, Will Self, and the Great Vowel Shift, which The Sunday Times described as “ingenious, energetic and inventive”. Her memoir about being a carer, The Fragments of My Father, is published by Fourth Estate in 2020. Her next novel, The Watermark, is pubioshed by Granta.
     Sam has also written dark, crossover thrillers for young adults, published by Faber & Faber, which have been translated into five languages. The Boys Who Saved the World, a satire on the War on Terror, is currently being developed for film. Blackout was nominated for the Carnegie prize, won the Stockport Schools Prize and second place in the Lancashire Book of the Year award, as well as being shortlisted for the Manchester Book Award and the RED prize. Her latest YA novel, It Ends With You, was published under the name SK Wright by Little, Brown in 2018.
     She is co-director of independent press Dodo Ink, which champions daring and difficult literary fiction, where the authors she has edited include Seraphina Madsen, Neil Griffiths and Monique Roffey. She also has many years of editorial experience with the The Literary Consultancy and Jericho Writers.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction; memoir; young adult
• Location: London
• Possible meeting place: The British Library; Wimbledon (location tbc)
• Sam is on Twitter

ANN MORGAN is a writer and editor based in Folkestone. Following the success of her project to read a book from every country in 2012, which led to a TED talk and the non-fiction book Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer (Harvill Secker 2015), Ann continues to blog about international literature at A Year of Reading the World.
     Her debut novel, Beside Myself (Bloomsbury 2016), has been translated into nine languages and optioned for TV, and was a bestseller in Italy. Her next novel, Crossing Over, was published by Renard Press, after being released as an Audible Original title, narrated by Adjoa Andoh, in 2019.
     In 2017, Ann took up a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Kent, where she spent two years working one-to-one with students of all levels and disciplines to help improve their writing. She holds a first-class degree in English literature from Cambridge University, a master’s in Creative Writing from UEA and a post-graduate diploma from the London School of Journalism.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, blogging and blooks
• Location: Kent & London
• Possible meeting places: Steep Street café; Folkestone or the British Library or Southbank Centre
  Ann is on Twitter

IAN NETTLETON has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the UEA and has taught creative writing at the UEA and currently lectures undergraduates and MA students in creative writing at the Open University and the National Centre for Writing. His National Centre for Writing podcast, How to Structure a Novel, can be found here.
    After his previous literary thriller, The Last Migration, was runner-up in the 2014 Bath Novel Award and the Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award; his literary thriller Out of Nowhere won the 2023 Bath Novel Award. His flash fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the Edinburgh International Flash Fiction Award and longlisted for the Reflex Flash Prize. Additionally, short fiction and novel extracts have been included in numerous anthologies.
    He has written and presented ‘Sixty Second Classics’ – summarising works of fiction – for BBC TV’s Pebble Mill, appeared on Radio 4’s Open Book, produced covers for Unthank Books, and was an editorial assistant on Writing Talk: Interviews with Writers about the Creative Process (Routledge, 2020).

• Areas of expertise: novels: literary, thrillers, science fiction; short fiction
• Location: Norwich
• Possible meeting place: Cafe Bar Marzano at The Forum, Norwich
  Ian’s website; Ian is also on Twitter

IRENOSEN OKOJIE is a Nigerian British writer. Her debut novel Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for an Edinburgh International First Book Award. Her short story collection Speak Gigantular, published by Jacaranda Books, was shortlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Her short story collection Nudibranch is published by Little Brown’s Dialogue Books imprint, followed by next novel, Curandera, in 2024.
     Her short stories have been published internationally including Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2017, Kwani? and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. In 2020, she won the prestigious AKO Caine Prize for her story ‘Grace Jones’. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post, amongst others.
     Irenosen has run workshops for the Southbank Centre, the British Council, the RSC and various festivals and universities. She was recently inducted as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as one of the Forty Under Forty initiative.  She was presented at the London Short Story Festival by Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri as a dynamic writing talent to watch and featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London’s exciting new authors. She was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature in the 2021 Birthday Honours.

• Areas of expertise: literary & speculative fiction; short stories
• Location: London
• Possible meeting place: Wellcome Collection Cafe
  Irenosen’s website; Irenosen is also on Twitter

BETHAN ROBERTS has published five novels and writes drama for BBC Radio 4. Her books include My Policeman (Chatto & Windus 2012), the story of 1950s policeman, his wife and his male lover, and Mother Island (2014), which was the recipient of a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize. Her latest novel, Graceland, tells the story of Elvis Presley and his mother, Gladys. She also writes short fiction, for which she has won the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Prize and the RA Pin Drop award.
     Bethan has taught creative writing at Chichester University and Goldsmiths College, as well as for West Dean College, the Open University and Mslexia magazine. She lives in Brighton with her family.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction; biographical fiction; short stories; radio drama
  
• Location: Brighton
• Possible meeting place: Jubilee Library cafe
  Bethan’s website; Bethan is also on Twitter

EMMA CLAIRE SWEENEY is the Director of the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio.
     During her 15 years of teaching creative writing, Emma has mentored many fiction and non-fiction writers both in person and via videocall. She is a central academic at the Open University, where she chairs and designs undergraduate and post-graduate creative writing courses. She was formerly Director of Professional Tutoring at New York University – London, and she co-founded City University of London’s year-long novel-writing course..
     Emma has an MA in English from the University of Cambridge and another in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and a PhD from the Open University.
     She has won Society of Authors, Arts Council and Royal Literary Fund awards, and has written for publications such as the Paris Review, TIME and the Washington Post.
     She was named as both an Amazon Rising Star and a Hive Rising Writer for her debut novel, Owl Song at Dawn (Legend Press 2016), which went on to win Nudge Literary Book of the Year. The novel was inspired by Emma’s sister who has cerebral palsy and autism and was informed by her PhD research into literary representations of learning disability.
     Stemming from Something Rhymed, the website on female literary friendship that Emma runs with her own friend Emily Midorikawa, she co-wrote their debut non-fiction book, A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf (Aurum/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2017). In her foreword, Margaret Atwood described the work as a “great service to literary history”. She is currently working on a new novel.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction & literary/commercial crossover, short stories, narrative non-fiction, memoir
  
• Locations: London & Hertfordshire
• Possible meeting places: British Library Members’ Room
  Emma’s website; Emma is also on Twitter and Facebook

WENDY VAIZEY’s fiction has appeared in national newspaper magazines, literary journals and anthologies. Published stories include ‘Dave’, ‘Brief Conceit’, ‘My Scandalous Sex Life’, ‘The Suspect Taverna’, ‘The Rubber Dress’, ‘The Greyhound’ and ‘The Year Out’. Her novel Independence is represented by the Jessica Craig Literary Agency.
     She also publishes academic research, with interests in Iris Murdoch, John Banville and psychoanalytical criticism. She has been awarded a Faber Fellowship and an Arts Council METAL residency exploring use of the digital in the arts, and she has been shortlisted for other prizes such as Myriad Editions and Escalator.
     She has taught Creative Writing at The Open University and Kingston University, and is Course Director of the Distance Learning Creative Writing MA and MFA programmes at Kingston University (London). She has worked in the City of London and as a broadsheet contributor and editor and has an MA and PhD from the University of East Anglia.

• Areas of expertise: literary & commercial fiction, including some genres; short stories; memoir, biography & narrative non-fiction; young adult
• Location: London & Hertfordshire
• Possible meeting place: British Library
  Wendy is on Twitter

ENGLAND – MIDLANDS

EMMA HENDERSON studied at Somerville College, Oxford and Yale University. She wrote blurbs for Penguin Books for two years, then spent a decade teaching English in comprehensive schools and further education colleges, before moving to the French Alps where, for six years, she ran a ski and snowboard lodge.
     She has taught creative writing at Birmingham and Sheffield universities; she now lives in Staffordshire and is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Keele University, where she teaches prose, poetry and life writing at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Emma’s debut novel, Grace Williams Says It Loud, was published in 2010. It won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award, the Authors’ Club First Novel Award and the Wellcome Book Prize, and was runner-up for the Mind Book of the Year. Her second novel, published in April 2017, The Valentine House, has its roots in a remote valley in the French Alps, where she lived for six years. The Times described it as “beautifully written” and the Daily Mail as “gripping and poignant”.
     Emma genuinely enjoys teaching creative writing and, as a teacher/mentor/supervisor/editor, confident in her ability to advise and enable. She brings empathy to her teaching and a deep understanding of the insecurities, life journeys and difficulties experienced by beginner writers, while also having the reputation of being a sharply critical reader, particularly in terms of the fine detail of writing.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction; short stories; life writing
• Location: Newcastle-under-Lyme; Stoke-on-Trent
• Possible meeting place: Keele University Blackwells coffee shop
  Emma is on Twitter and Facebook

JONATHAN TAYLOR is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His books include two novels, Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), a memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018). He is editor of anthologies including High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories (Valley, 2018).
     He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction; short stories; memoir; poetry
  
• Location: Leicester (London may also be possible by arrangement)
  
• Possible meeting place: The University of Leicester
  Jonathan is on Twitter

ENGLAND – NORTH

YVONNE BATTLE-FELTON is an American writer living in Lancashire. A writer of fiction and Creative Nonfiction, her writing has been published in literary journals and anthologies. Her debut novel, Remembered, (Dialogue Books) was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2019). She is an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow (2019-2021).
     Winner of a Northern Writers Award in fiction (2017), Yvonne was shortlisted for the Words and Women Competition (2017) and the Sunderland University Waterstones SunStory Award in 2018 and awarded a Society of Author’s Foundation Grant for Remembered in 2018. She was commended for children’s writing in the 2017 Faber Andlyn BAME Prize. Yvonne has six non-fiction children’s titles forthcoming with Penguin Random House: stories featuring Innana, Anansi and Loki and Thor are included in Ladybird Tales of Superheroes with three titles, The Sword in the Stone, Sundiata, and Princess Yennenga in a forthcoming title.
     Yvonne is represented by the Elise Dillsworth agency and holds an MA in Writing (dual concentration fiction and non-fiction) from Johns Hopkins University and a Creative Writing PhD from Lancaster University. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and Creative Industries at Sheffield Hallam University; she’s also a commissioning editor for John Murray Press, based in their Sheffield office. Yvonne is a creative producer, writer, and is co-founder and co-Director of North West Literary Arts. Her aim is to increase diversity in publishing and to take over the world, one story at a time.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction; historical fiction; short stories; creative non-fiction
• Location: Lancaster
• Possible meeting place: Printroom Café & Bar, The Storey, Lancaster
  Yvonne is on Twitter and Instagram

SUSAN BARKER is the author of three novels. Her most recent novel, The Incarnations (2015) is about a taxi driver in contemporary Beijing, interwoven with stories from other historical eras. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winner, was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize and was a Waterstones Book Club pick. Susan spent several years living in China while researching the book While writing the novel, she spent several years living in China, researching contemporary Beijing and the various historical eras featured.
     She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester, and has been a recipient of two Royal Literary Fund Fellowships, Arts Council grants and a Society of Authors award. She now lives in Manchester, where she is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and is working on a new book.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction
• Location: Manchester
• Possible meeting place: Manchester Museum cafe; Whitworth Art Gallery cafe
  Susan is on Twitter

MARTYN BEDFORD is the prize-winning and internationally renowned author of eight novels and a short-story collection in a career spanning nearly 25 years. His debut novel for young adults, Flip (Walker Books 2011), won four regional prizes and was shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Book Award. It was also nominated for the Carnegie Medal, as were his next two YA novels: Never Ending (Walker Books 2014) and Twenty Questions for Gloria (Walker Books 2016), winner of the 13+ category in the Coventry Inspiration Book Awards.
     Martyn is also the author of five novels for adults: Acts of Revision (Bantam Press 1996), winner of the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award; Exit, Orange & Red (Bantam Press 1997); The Houdini Girl (Penguin, 1999); Black Cat (Penguin, 2001); and The Island of Lost Souls (Bloomsbury 2006). His short stories have been published in newspapers, magazines, online and broadcast on radio, and a solo collection, Letters Home (2017), was published by Comma Press. Between them, his books have been translated into 15 languages.
     A former journalist and graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Martyn has taught creative writing in universities and for the Arvon Foundation since 2001 and is currently a senior lecturer at Leeds Trinity University, teaching on the English undergraduate programmes and the Creative Writing MA. He has been the recipient of two Royal Literary Fund Fellowships and is a lector on the RLF’s Reading Round scheme.

• Areas of expertise: literary & commercial fiction; short stories; young adult fiction
• Locations: Leeds & Bradford
• Possible meeting places: Leeds Art Gallery Café (Leeds); Waterstones café (Bradford)
  Martyn’s website

RP BOLTON is a writer and college lecturer. Her first psychological thriller The Perfect House was published by HQ in 2021, with My Lovely Daughter following in 2022. Under the name Rachel McIntyre, she is also the internationally published author of three young adult novels, Me & Mr J, The Number One Rule for Girls and This Careless Life, a modern re-imagining of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. She also writes short stories for women’s magazines and travel articles for numerous publications.
She has been longlisted for the Branford Boase Award and was chosen for the New Writing North Read Regional campaign. She has spoken at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Leipzig Book Festival, among many others, and has delivered writing workshops in schools, colleges and libraries across the UK.
     Over the last 20 years, Rachel has taught English and Creative Writing in a variety of community and educational settings in the UK, the US and Spain. She has significant experience of mentoring emerging writers, providing detailed and constructive feedback with a focus on the development of self-evaluation skills, helping writers to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their own work.

• Areas of expertise: thrillers; young adult fiction; older children’s fiction
• Locations: Manchester & Leeds
• Possible meeting places: Whitworth Art Gallery, Central Library, John Rylands Library (Manchester); Arts Café, Leeds Art Gallery Café, Central Library (Leeds)
  Rachel’s website; Rachel is also on Twitter

NAOMI BOOTH is an award-winning writer and academic, named as a Fresh Voice: Fifty Writers to Read Now by the Guardian in 2018. She was born and raised in West Yorkshire and now lives in York.
     Her first work of fiction, The Lost Art of Sinking, was selected for New Writing North’s Read Regional campaign and won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2016. Her debut novel, Sealed (Dead Ink Books, 2017) is a horrifying tale of body mutation and environmental contamination, described by the Guardian as “not for the faint-hearted…  a marvellous first novel” and shortlisted for the Not the Booker Award.
     Her short fiction has been longlisted for the Times EFG Short Story Award and the Galley Beggars Short Story Prize, and is anthologised in the Best British Short Stories 2019 (Salt). She was recently commissioned to re-write the regional folktale of the boggart for the Audible Original series HAG.
     Naomi read English at the University of Cambridge and has an MA and PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. She worked for several years as an editor, and has taught creative writing in different settings for the last decade, including on MA courses at the University of Sussex and as Subject Director of Creative Writing at York St John University.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction, experimental fiction, genre fiction (horror, speculative fiction, cli-fi), novels, novellas, short stories, flash fiction
• Location: York and Durham
• Possible meeting place: York Art Gallery café
  Naomi’s website; Naomi is also on Twitter

SARAH BUTLER has three novels published by Picador in the UK and 14 international publishers: Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love (2013) and Before The Fire (2015). In November 2018, she published a novella, Not Home, written in conversation with people living in unsupported temporary accommodation in Manchester. Her latest novel, Jack and Bet, was published by Picador in spring 2020.
     Her work explores ideas of home, belonging, identity, family and urban landscapes. She is currently a CHASE Scholar in Creative Writing at the Open University and lectures part-time in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has taught creative writing in Malaysia, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium; at many UK Universities including University College London, University of Manchester and University of Cambridge, and run creative writing workshops in community settings in London and Manchester.
     She also explores the relationship between writing and place through participatory projects, heading up the Urban Words literature consultancy. Recent writing residencies include writer-in-residence on London Underground’s Central line; at Great Ormond Street Hospital; and Stories From The Road – a project exploring personal stories of Oxford Road, Manchester.

• Area of expertise: literary & literary/commercial crossover fiction; short stories
  
• Location: Manchester
  
• Possible meeting places: Manchester Central Library or Whitworth Gallery
  Sarah’s website; Sarah is also on Twitter

ALISTAIR DANIEL is a writer and Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University and has previously taught at the University of the Arts London and the University of East Anglia, where he was a Charles Pick Fellow.
His short stories have appeared in a wide range of US, UK and Irish publications including The Missouri Review, Narrative, Litro, Stand, Flash, The Stinging Fly and The Irish Times. His work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and longlisted for the Fish International Short Story Prize. He has an MPhil in Publishing Studies from The University of Stirling, an MA in Creative Writing from the University of London, and is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the Open University while working on his debut novel, Montreal, which was shortlisted for the Northern Writers Award in 2018.

• Areas of expertise: literary fiction; short stories
• Location: Liverpool
• Suggested meeting place: Liverpool Central Library or The Walker Art Museum

 

SUMAYYA USMANI  is an award-winning author is based in Glasgow. Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, she spent her early childhood on merchant ships traveling the seas with her parents and later settled in Karachi where she grew up. Sumayya was a lawyer for twelve years but left law to become a full time writer in 2011. Sumayya’s passion for food and nostalgic writing lead to her first cookbook with memories Summers Under the Tamarind Tree winning the Gourmand Book Award in 2016 as well being shortlisted for the Food & Travel Book Awards. Her second book Mountain Berries and Desert Spice was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Awards 2017. Both were published by Frances Lincoln. Sumayya enjoys narrative nonfiction writing and her upcoming memoir Andaza: A memoir of food, flavour and finding freedom in the Pakistani kitchen (Murdoch Books, out 2023) won the Scottish Book Trust Next Chapter Award 2021, as a work in progress.
    Sumayya is a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet with Jay Rayner and has worked with Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden and Rachel Allen, amongst many other celebrity food writers. Sumayya was a columnist for the Sunday Herald and has appeared in and written for The New York Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Delicious, Olive, Saveur, BBC Good Food and many other publications. Sumayya is currently working on her next nonfiction book, which is a braided narrative of memoir, history and food.   

• Areas of expertise: nonfiction book proposal writing, nonfiction with a focus on food and memoir
• Location: Glasgow 
• Possible meeting places: Mitchell Library (Glasgow), Waterstones Sauchiehall Street (Glasgow)
  Sumayya’s website; Sumayya is also on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram