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Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)

 

Professor Ailsa Cox

  • Short story writer

Ailsa Cox’s stories are widely published in magazines and anthologies including Best British Short Stories 2014, The End (Unthank Books), Litro and The Mechanics’ Institute Review.  Her collection, The Real Louise, was published by Headland Press in 2009. Other books include Writing Short Stories (Routledge) and Alice Munro (Northcote House). She is also the founder of the Edge Hill Prize, the only UK-based literary award for a published short-story collection. She is Professor of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University, the editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice and deputy director of the European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR).

You can find her on Twitter

 


Mbozi Haimbe

  • Former MSt in Creative Writing Student at the Institute of Continuing Education and short story writer

Mbozi Haimbe was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia. She has an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge, and is currently working on a collection of African inspired short stories while also exploring ideas for her debut novel. Her story ‘Madam’s Sister’ has won the Africa regional prize of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and is one of five shortlisted for the overall prize. Mbozi lives in Norfolk with her family.  

 


Daisy Johnson

  • British novelist and short story writer

Daisy Johnson (born 1990) is a British novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Everything Under, was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, making her the youngest shortlisted author in the prize's history. She is the winner of the Edgehill Prize and the AM Heath Prize. She has been widely published. 

You can find her on Twitter

 

 


Dame Gillian Beer

  • Literary critic and academic

Dame Gillian Beer is a literary critic and academic. She was President of Clare Hall from 1994 to 2001, and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. She served as chair of the judges for the Booker Prize in 1997. She has published extensively in the field of Victorian studies. She has also written on Virginia Woolf and on the relationship between literature, science, and other academic disciplines. She was awarded the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll in 2017.

 

 


Kiran Millwood Hargrave

  • Poet, playwright and novelist

Kiran Millwood Hargarave's books include The Girl of Ink & Stars, which was the winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2017; The Island at the End of Everything, which was shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Book Awards 2017, amongst others; and The Way Past Winter, which won the Blackwell’s Children’s Book of the Year Award 2018. Kiran’s first YA novel, The Deathless Girls is now available for preorder. Her debut book for adults, The Mercies will be published by Picador in February 2020.

You can find her on Twitter

 

Dr Lucy Durneen

  • Teaching Associate for Creative Writing at the Institute of Continuing Education

Lucy Durneen’s writing has been published and commended in journals including World Literature Today, Hotel Amerika, and Meniscus. Her fiction has been Pushcart Prize nominated, while her non-fiction has been adapted for radio broadcast and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2017. Her first short story collection, Wild Gestures, was published in 2017 and won Best Short Story Collection at the Saboteur Awards in London. It was also longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2018.

You can find her on Twitter

 


Sam Jordison

  • Co-director of award-winning publisher, Galley Beggar Press

Sam Jordison is the co-director of the award winning independent publisher Galley Beggar Press. He also writes about books and publishing for The Guardian and is the author of several works of non-fiction such as the best-selling Crap Towns series and the anti-Brexit guidebook, Enemies Of The People.

You can find him on Twitter

Galley Beggar Press

 


Sarvat Hasin

  • Author of novels, essays, short stories and poetry

Sarvat Hasin was born in London and grew up in Karachi. Her first novel, This Wide Night, was published by Penguin India and long listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second book You Can't Go Home Again was published in 2018 and was featured on Vogue India and The Hindu's end of year lists. Her essays, short stories and poetry have appeared in publications such as On Anxiety, The Mays Anthology, English Pen and Harper's Bazaar. She works at the Almeida theatre and is currently working on her next novel.

You can find her on Twitter

You can find her on Instagram

 


Tessa Hadley

  • Award-winning novelist

Tessa Hadley’s novels have twice reached the longlists of the Orange Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and in 2016, she won one of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes for fiction. The Windham-Campbell judges described her as "one of English's finest contemporary writers" while her writing "brilliantly illuminates ordinary lives with extraordinary prose that is superbly controlled, psychologically acute, and subtly powerful." Tessa Hadley has written six novels – including Accidents in the Home and The London Train - and two collections of short stories. Her latest novel, The Past, 2015, was awarded the Hawthornden prize. She publishes short stories regularly in the New Yorker, reviews for the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

 


Tom de Freston

  • Artist and writer

Tom de Freston is an artist and writer based in Oxford. He has been the holder of various fellowships and residencies, including a Leverhulme residency at Cambridge University, the inugarel Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University and a Levy Plumb Residency at Christ’s College. His multimedia projects have received funding from the AHRC, TORCH, the Fell Fund and Arts Council England. His most recent publication was a graphic poetic retelling of Orpehus and Eurydice (Bloomsbury Academic 2015)

You can find him on Instagram

 


Kate Swindlehurst

  • Short story and memoir writer

Kate Swindlehurst moved from Cumbria to Cambridge in 2008. After completing a Creative Writing MA at Anglia Ruskin and receiving an Escalator Award in 2010, she has been writing ever since. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2004, she is a firm believer in the therapeutic effects of Argentine tango, explored in her memoir The Tango Effect: Parkinson’s & the Healing Power of Dance, to be published by Unbound in January 2020. As well as health and well-being, Kate is interested in our relationship with the natural world and spent almost two years as writer in residence at Cambridge University Botanic Garden, with support from Arts Council England. A regular blogger, she has completed two short story collections and has had short stories & non-fiction published in print and online. Inspired by visits to the Calais ‘Jungle’, her latest novel The Station Master, recently shortlisted for the Caledonia Award, looks at our attitudes to migration. She is about to embark on a new work combining responses to place and belonging with an exploration of the common ground between writing and dance.

You can find her on Twitter

 


Dr Midge Gillies

  • Academic Director, Institute Teaching Officer in Creative Writing at the Institute of Continuing Education

Dr Midge Gillies is the author of seven non-fiction books, including biographies of Amy Johnson and Marie Lloyd. She is the author of Writing Lives (CUP, 2009) and co-author, with Sally Cline, of Literary Non-Fiction: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). She studied History at Girton College and has written for a range of national, international and regional newspapers and magazines. For three years she was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and is currently Academic Director for Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education.

You can find her on Twitter

 


Laura McNeill

  • Associate Agent in the Books Department at Peters Fraser and Dunlop

Laura McNeill is an Associate Agent in the Books Department at Peters Fraser and Dunlop. After completing a degree in Classics at Oxford University, she worked with pre-1650’s books and manuscripts in the antiquarian book trade, and briefly as a magician’s assistant, before joining PFD in 2015. She works closely with Tim Bates and Annabel Merullo across all their titles, and looks after the UK & Commonwealth rights for New Directions, the New York based independent publishing house, on behalf of Tim.

Peter Fraser and Dunlop on Twitter

 


Jean McNeil

  • Short story writer and novelist

Jean McNeil is the author of 14 books, including six novels and a collection of short fiction, Nights in a Foreign Country. Her work has won or been shortlisted for several awards including the Prism International Prize, the Journey Prize and the Governor General's Award for Fiction. Recently her memoir about Antarctica, Ice Diaries, won the Banff International Film and Book Festival's Grand Prize for literature. She teaches at the University of East Anglia where she is Reader in Creative Writing and directs the Creative-critical PhD programme. 

Here's Jean's website

You can find her on Twitter

You can find her on Instagram

 


Louise Tucker

  • Editor, lecturer and writer

Louise Tucker is an editor, lecturer and writer. Having worked full-time in publishing and academia, including stints at Bloomsbury, Granta, HarperCollins and Quarto, she is now a freelance editor and a creative writing lecturer at Goldsmiths and London Metropolitan University. She has been a reader for the Costa Short Story Awards since its inception in 2012 and has discovered a placed writer/story every year. She also runs her own business making notebooks and helping people self-publish and writes a food blog. Her first novel, which is currently on submission to agents, was longlisted for the Stockholm Writers' First Pages Prize.

You can find her on Twitter