ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lili Stern-Pohlmann (1930 – 2021) was born Lili Stern in Lwów on 29 March 1930 and before the war lived in Kraków with her parents and brother. She and her mother were the only family members who survived the war. Lili arrived in London on 29 March 1946 in the first of three transports of Jewish children brought over from Poland by the Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld, who gave them a new life and freedom in this country.

Lili worked tirelessly to build bridges between the Polish Catholic and Jewish communities. She strove to make sure the survivors’ legacy is heard, she wanted to make sure that others know about the brave people who risked their lives to save Jews. In 2007 she received one of Poland’s highest accolades, The Commander’s Cross of Polonia Restituta, awarded for extraordinary and distinguished service.

Maciej Hen was born in 1955 in Warsaw. He graduated from the Cinematography Department at the Film School in Lodz. For years he has been active in cinematography, scriptwriting, still photography, directing of documentary films, translating from English, all fields of journalism (including photojournalism), television lighting design, music and sometimes even acting. 

His first novel was Według niej (According to Her) published under a pen name Maciej Nawariak. In 2015 he published his second novel, Solfatara, which won numerous awards: the Book of the Year 2015 of the Warsaw Literary Premiere, the 2016 Gombrowicz Prize and was shortlisted to the 2016 Norwid Prize and the 2016 Angelus Prize. His third novel, Deutsch dla średnio zaawansowanych (Deutsch for Intermediates; Wydawnictwo Literackie) appeared in 2019. In 2021 he published his non-fiction book, Beatlesi w Polsce (The Beatles in Poland), half reportage, half essay.

Hen is currently working on an epistolographic historical novel Dni z Kallimachem (Days with Callimachus) scheduled for publication in 2022.

At the age of sixteen, Anees dropped out of school and left home to become a writer. He travelled across India and worked as a bellboy, waiter, shop assistant and ghost writer before joining advertising. He currently works as a Creative Director with FCB India. His published works include Vanity Bagh (winner of The Hindu Literary Prize for Best Fiction 2013), The Blind Lady’s Descendants (winner of the Raymond Crossword Book Award for Best Fiction 2014 and the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award 2018), The Small-town Sea (winner of the Atta Galatta-Banaglore Literature Festival Book Prize for Best Fiction 2017), and The Odd Book of Baby Names. His works have been translated into French, German, and several Indian languages.

Ashutosh Bhardwaj is a bilingual journalist, fiction writer and literary critic. He experiments with prose in various forms and genres. As a journalist, he has traveled across Central India and documented the conditions of tribes caught in the conflict between the Maoist insurgents and the police, and investigating encounter killings political corruption, and electoral malpractice. He is the only journalist in India to have won the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism for four consecutive years.  In 2015, he was shortlisted for the Reuters’ Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism.    

 He has published three books: a story collection, Jo Frame Men Na The; a book of essays on literature and cinema, Pitra Vadh; a creative biography of Dandakaranya, The Death Script; besides several other stories, diaries, travelogues and critical essays. Shortlisted for Tata Lit Fest 2020 award and Kamaladevi Chhattopadhyay award and winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2020 Atta Galatta award, The Death Script is appearing soon in several languages. Pitra Vadh has received the prestigious Devi Shankar Avasthi Samman for the year 2020 awarded to a work of literary criticism. He has received the Krishna Baldev Vaid Fellowship for his innovative fiction and was a writer-in-residence at the Sangam House in Bangalore, 2012-13. As a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2017-19, he wrote a monograph, Women in Solitude, a study of solitary women in select novels and cinema. A volume he has co-edited on the Indian perspective of the 19th century migrations from India is forthcoming from Routledge.

Saleh Addonia was born in Eritrea from an Eritrean mother and an Ethiopian Father. As a child, he survived the Om Hajar massacre and migrated to Sudan. He grew up in refugee camps where he lost his hearing at the age of 12. Addonia spent his early teens in Saudi Arabia and arrived in London as an 18 year old refugee. Addonia has published a short stories collection in Italian, titled: She is Another Country, translated by Nausicäa Angelotti and published by the Swiss/Italian house, Casagrande editions. His work appeared in the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 ORE and in Specimen and Zam magazines, and in an anthology, Lucifer Over London. He has been awarded the Literature Matters Awards 2021 by the Royal Society of Literature. The Feeling House is his first collection in English.

Nathalie Abi-Ezzi was born in Beirut, and has lived in Lebanon,Austria and the UK.

It was while working on her PhD in English Literature at King’s College London that she realized that she wanted to write her own novels rather than just analyse other people’s. So, while working variously as an editor, teacher and tutor, she wrote and published several prize-winning short stories and her first novel,A Girl Made of Dust (4th Estate, 2008), which was short-listed for the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, and was the winner of the LiBeraturpreis in 2011.

Kate Armstrong was born in 1979 and grew up in the North of England. She studied English Literature at Oxford University, first at New College and then at Merton, where she wrote her DPhil on John Donne. She also held a lectureship at St Hugh’s. Kate then followed a career in international business, writing her first novel, The Storyteller, on trains and flights and in hotel rooms. She is currently working more comfortably on her second.

Anna Blasiak is a poet and translator. She has translated over 40 books from English into Polish and some fiction and poetry from Polish into English. In addition to her book-length translations, her work has been published in Best European Fiction 2015, Asymptote, The Guardian, B O D Y Literature, Modern Poetry in Translation and York Literary Review. More: annablasiak.com.

Lisa Kalloo is an emerging queer, BAME, British artist/photographer of Indian/West Indian heritage. She studied law but moved away from it. In her photography she explores different cultures. More at lisakalloophotography.co.uk

JO DALTON is an experimental Artist and Motion Designer. Her design studio Room Fifty Nine is based in Bristol and she works in media ranging from Intaglio Printmaking, Painting and Illustration, through to Graphic Design, Motion Graphics and Animation.

Emma was born in London, and grew up partly in Manhattan and Brussels. After studying Drama at university she had various jobs, including driving a sandwich van and selling musical instruments, before her first novel The Mathematics of Love (Headline Review/William Morrow) was published. It is possibly the only novel ever nominated for both the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book and the RNA Novel of the Year, and it was followed by her Sunday Times bestselling second novel, A Secret Alchemy. Her long-established blog This Itch of Writing gave rise to Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction, (John Murray Learning) and she also teaches and mentors writers. She is the great-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood, and she lives in London.

Ewan Gault is an award winning Scottish writer. He was born in Kuwait and over the last decade has lived in Japan, Italy, Kenya, Ethiopia, The Western Highlands and now Oxford. Writing is the only way he can get back to all the places he has been.

Since graduating with a distinction from Glasgow University’s Creative Writing Masters in 2006, his short stories have been widely performed and frequently published in journals such as: New Writing Scotland, Gutter Magazine and From Glasgow to Saturn. Other short stories have won the Fish/Crime Writers Association prize in 2007, shortlisted 2008, won The Glasgow 2020 Prize, and the Runners Up prize in The Scotsman/Orange competition 2005. Last year two of his stories were shortlisted for The Scottish National Galleries Short Story Prize and The Bloody Scotland Festival Short Story Prize.

The Most Distant Way was inspired by the time Ewan spent training at a high altitude centre in Kenya’s Rift Valley, an area that is home to the legendary Kalenjin “running tribe,” who. since 1980, have won 40% of distance running men’s medals at World and Olympic Championships.

Evan Guilford-Blake writes fiction, plays, poetry and creative non-fiction for adults and children. His stories have appeared in numerous print and online journals; they have won 13 competitions and received two Pushcart Prize nominations. Noir(ish), his first novel, was recently issued by Penguin. About 40 of his plays have been produced; eighteen are published, and he’s won more than 40 playwriting contests.

He and his wife (and inspiration), Roxanna, live in the southeastern US. More information is at: www.guilford-blake.com.

Noir(ish) on Amazon (link directs to your nearest local site).

The links to other online work include:
Absence (a Pushcart-Prize nominated story)
Creatures of Dreams (on page 23 of Wordgumbo)
Excerpt from my play Ceremonies of Prayer
Mama on Deepsouthmag.com
A Box of Beautifuls on Southern Pacific Review
19 Manhattan Photographs from 1977 in the Bay Laurel literary journal
Dreamland, a short play – Prick of the Spindle
The Collected Works of Hester Prynne, Volume 1 and Related Matters, flash fiction – ExFic
Julio Beneath the Orange Tree, flash fiction – Apocrypha and Abstractions
The Noir(ish) trailer

John Harvey taught at Cambridge and is the prize-winning author of five highly acclaimed novels and four studies of colour, clothes, and illustration. He has reviewed widely, for the Sunday Times, the London Review of Books, and many others. Unusual in their scope and variety, his novels have tackled the asset-stripping that has devastated working communities; torture and resistance to a military dictatorship; family break-up in the world of road-haulage and motor-racing; a notorious love-crisis in the art-world of the Victorians. In the words of A.S. Byatt, his prose is poetic and incisive, while Anthony Thwaite described his work as ‘Tolstoyan’.
https://www.john-harvey.co.uk/

Kevin Jackson is an English writer, broadcaster and film-maker. His books include Constellation of Genius, Carnal and the best-selling Kindle Single, Mayflower: The Voyage from Hell. He won Cambridge University’s Seatonian Prize for poetry, and has published a translation of Crimean Sonnets, by the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. 

OTHER BOOKS BY KEVIN JACKSON

Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings (Faber, London & Boston, 1990; revised edition 2003)
The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader (ed.) (Carcanet, Manchester, 1993; paperback 2004)
The Oxford Book of Money (OUP, Oxford & New York, 1995)
The Risk of Being Alive (ed.) (Cambridge Quarterly, 1996)
The Language of Cinema (Carcanet UK, Routledge USA, 1998)
Invisible Forms (Picador UK 1999, St Martin’s USA 2000)
A Ruskin Alphabet (Worple Press, Kent 2000)
Pyramid: Beyond Imagination (BBC Books, 2002; also translated into several languages)
Anthony Burgess: Revolutionary Sonnets (ed.) (Carcanet 2002; reissued 2017)
The Verbals: Conversations with Iain Sinclair (Worple, 2003)
Pataphysics: Definitions and Citations (co-ed.) (Atlas Press, 2003)
The Anatomy of Melancholy: Selections (ed.) (Carcanet Press, 2004)
Humphrey Jennings (Picador, 2004)
Letters of Introduction (Carcanet, 2004)
Withnail & I (British Film Institute, 2004)
Fast (Portobello, 2006)
The Pataphysical Flook (Atlas, 2007)
The Book of Hours (Duckworth, 2007)
Lawrence of Arabia (British Film Institute, 2007)
Moose (Reaktion, 2009)
Bite: A Vampire Handbook (Portobello, 2009)
Aussie Dans Le Metro: A Festschrift for John Baxter (Alces Press, 2009)
The Worlds of John Ruskin (Pallas Athene/Ruskin Foundation, 2010)
The Bleaching Stream (Atlas Press/LIP, 2011)
Constellation of Genius: 1922, Modernism Year Zero (Hutchinson UK, 2012, FSG USA 2013). Reissued in paperback as Constellation of Genius: Modernism and All That Jazz, 2013
Nosferatu (British Film Institute, 2015)
Carnal to the Point of Scandal (Pallas Athene, 2015)
Coles to Jerusalem (Pallas Athene, 2017)
Crimean Sonnets: An English Version (Worple Press, 2017)

Mayflower – The Voyage from Hell, 2013
Darwin’s Odyssey, 2013
Columbus, The Accidental Hero 2014
The Queen’s Pirate, Sir Francis Drake, 2016
Coles to Jerusalem, 2016
Huddled Masses, 2018

GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS (with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson)

How to be Rich (freely adapted from Ruskin’s “Unto This Last”) (Ruskin Foundation, 2006)
How to See (from “Modern Painters”, etc) (Ruskin Foundation, 2008)
How to Work (from “The Nature of Gothic”, etc. (2018)
Bloke’s Progress (Ruskin Foundation, 2018)

Dante’s Inferno (Knockabout, 2012)

KAREN JENNINGS is a South African author. Her debut novel, Finding Soutbek, was shortlisted for the inaugural Etisalat Prize for African Fiction. Her memoir, Travels with my Father, was published in 2016, and in 2018 she released her debut poetry collection, Space Inhabited by Echoes.

Currently living in Brazil, last year Karen completed post-doctoral research at the Federal University of Goiás on the historical relationship between science and literature, with a focus on eusocial insects. 

Karen works with the mentorship programmes run by Writivism and Short Story Day Africa, both of which promote writing in Africa. Her interests lie in colonialism, historically and in the lasting impact that it has had on the continent of Africa and beyond. She is particularly concerned with the quiet lives of the everyday people who have been mostly forgotten by the politicians, big businesses and the rest of the world. In this way, she strives to give the ordinary a voice that can be heard and appreciated.

Marlene Lee can be described as:

A recent graduate of the MFA Fiction-Writing program at Brooklyn College.

A writer of novels who has found her publisher, Holland House Books and its mystery imprint, Grey Cells Press.

A retired teacher of children’s special education, theory and practice of stenotype, and high school and freshman English.

A retired court reporter.

An unretiring resident of Manhattan and Columbia, Missouri.

A pianist.

A slow but earnest student of Antoine Matondo, official French tutor of the Lakota Coffeehouse in Columbia where she is in nearly permanent residence at a table in back, reading, drinking lattes, and writing sentences that are too long.

Cristiane has been writing fiction since she discovered it as a way to explore real life through fiction when she was 15 years old. The Language of Belonging is her second novel. Her first book, Todos os Rios se Dirigem Para o Mar, was published in Portuguese only.

Cristiane was born in the northeast of Brazil. At 13, she started to work as a pre-school teacher in her village’s public school. The experiences she had with her students and their families during the following 13 years inspired her to create characters such as “Elena” and “Cecilia’s Mother.” At 18, she was accepted at the Universidade Estadual de Alagoas as a Portuguese, Literature, and English student. At 26, she went to the United States with intent to improve her English. She met her husband and almost a year later they married. They have one daughter. She resides in New England with her family.

Life continues to inspire her to write

Cass McMain was born in Albuquerque and raised in the far North Valley, among the cottonwoods. Her first love was always houseplants, and she now maintains a house full of them.

Her background as a greenhouse manager led to a long career in garden center management, but when the bottom fell out of the local industry, she took a new path. Or rather, an old path; Cass started writing at the age of six, knocking out stories on her typewriter.

While her love of nature came in part from her father, a man with the heart of a farmer and the soul of a philosopher, much of the writing Cass did as a child was done to please her mother, a woman with the heart of a philosopher, the soul of a demon and the unquenchable thirst of the mind reserved for the brilliant.

Recently, Cass’s writing muse has again been speaking to her: a voice she stopped paying attention to a long time ago. Her plants, some of which she has had since she was nine years old, remain the heart of her life, but now she has a desire to express herself in other ways.

Bowed, but not broken, Cass keeps her eye on the horizon, looking for a greenhouse to manage. Her favorite saying these days is “that was then; this is now.”

Timothy Ogene was born in Oyigbo, outside Port Harcourt in southern Nigeria. He has since lived in Liberia, Germany, the US, and the UK.  His poems, stories and reviews have appeared in Numero Cinq, Tincture Journal, One Throne Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, The Missing Slate, Stirring, Kin Poetry Journal, Mad Swirl, Blue Rock Review, aaduna, Harvard Review. His first collection of poetry, Descent & Other Poems, appeared in 2016 from Deerbrook Editions. He holds a first degree in English and History from St. Edward’s University, a Master’s in World Literatures in English from the University of Oxford, and he is currenly working on a Master’s in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Educated at Cambridge University, writer and filmmaker Jane Rogoyska studied film in Leeds and Poland, going on to make a series of award-winning short films and working extensively as writer and director. She is the author of the acclaimed biography of the German photojournalist Gerda Taro, who died while reporting on the Spanish Civil War. Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa (Jonathan Cape 2013) is now in development as a feature film based on her own script. Jane continues to work across different media on creative projects in film, theatre and radio including, in 2018, writing and presenting Still Here: a Polish Odyssey for BBC Radio 4, a documentary about Polish deportees to the USSR who settled in the UK after World War II.