Creative Writing Group at Crawley Library
Third Saturday of each month
10.30am – 12
Women in Crawley, join Forthwrite in 2026 contact us to sign up
Past Festival Guests
Past Panel and Podcast Guests
Lisa Allen-Agostini
Lisa Allen-Agostini is a writer, editor and stand-up comedian from Trinidad and Tobago. Her books include The Bread the Devil Knead (Myriad Editions UK), Home Home (Delacorte Press), Swallowing the Sky (Cane Arrow Press) and Trinidad Noir (Akashic Books). She is the mother of two daughters and two dogs. She lives in Trinidad and Tobago.
Lisa Jewell
Lisa Jewell is a New York Times and Sunday Times No 1 bestselling author who has been published worldwide in over twenty-five languages. Lisa has written a number of dark psychological thrillers, beginning with Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs, The Night She Disappeared and The Family Remains – all of which were No 1 Sunday Times bestsellers. She has been likened to Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell and has been described as the British Liane Moriarty.
She has sold 10 million copies worldwide. She lives in north London with her husband, two teenage daughters and the best dog in the world.
Lisa has written a total of 21 novels with the latest, None of This is True, due to be published in July 2023.
Judith Bryan
Judith Bryan’s short fiction, non-fiction and poetry appear in various magazines and anthologies including publications by Penguin, Bloomsbury and Peepal Tree. Her debut novel, Bernard and the Cloth Monkey, won the 1998 Saga Prize – republished in 2021 for Penguin’s inaugural Black Britain: Writing Back series, curated by Booker-prize winner Bernardine Evaristo. Judith’s play, ‘A Cold Snap’, was shortlisted for the Alfred Fagon Award. She has over twenty years experience teaching creative writing including running an MA programme. She has two historical novels in progress and is working towards a first collection of short stories.
Kit De Waal
Kit de Waal, born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father, was brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. In 2022 it was adapted for television by the BBC.
Her second novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and her young adult novel Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the Carnegie CLIP Award 2020. A collection of short stories, Supporting Cast was published in 2020. An anthology of working-class memoir, Common People was crowdfunded and edited by Kit in 2019.
Kit founded her own TV production company, Portopia Productions and the Big Book Weekend, a free digital literary festival in 2020 and was named the FutureBook Person of the Year 2019. Kit is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor and Writer in Residence at Leicester University.
Her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes was published in August 2022.
Uju Asika
Uju Asika is a multi-award nominated blogger, writer, speaker and creative consultant. She is the creator of the popular family blog Babes About Town and the author of three books including her acclaimed debut Bringing Up Race: How To Raise a Kind Child in a Prejudiced World. Hailed as ‘timely and important’ and one of the Best Books of September 2020 in the Evening Standard, Bringing Up Race earned a Starred Review in Publishers Weekly and was featured widely including Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Hour, Marie Claire, Good Morning Sunday and The Observer. Uju’s picture book A World For Me And You (Where Everyone Is Welcome) was published in 2022 and her latest book Raising Boys Who Do Better: A Hopeful Guide for A New Generation came out in June 2023.
A former journalist, Uju has also been a screenwriter and script editor for some of Nigeria’s spiciest TV dramas including the long-running soap Tinsel. Born in Nigeria, Uju grew up in the UK and has lived in London, New York and Lagos. She’s based in north London with her husband Abiye and two teenage sons. In her down time, she enjoys bingeing Netflix, piling up more books than she can read and dancing in her kitchen.
Mira V Shah
Mira V Shah is a #1 bestselling author and legal writer who lives in North London with her husband, three good dogs and a mediocre cat. She studied History at the University of Warwick before practising as a City lawyer. During the pandemic, Mira wrote her first ever novel, HER, a psychological drama, which explores themes of flawed perception, trauma, race and class.
HER is a #1 ebook bestseller and was published by Hodder & Stoughton in March 2023, with the paperback to follow on 23 November. Her second novel, THE HOUSESITTER will be published in 2024.
Annie Garthwaite
Annie grew up in a working-class community in the north east of England. She studied English at the University of Wales before embarking on a thirty-year international business career working with multi-national companies and eventually establishing her own communications consultancy. In 2017 she studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Warwick University and, during two years of study, wrote her debut novel Cecily which was published by Penguin in 2021. Cecily was named a ‘top pick’ by The Times and Sunday Times and a ‘Best Book of 2021’ by independent bookshops and Waterstones. Her second novel, The King’s Mother, will publish in July 2024.
Nicola Williams
Nicola Williams is a part-time Crown Court Judge, author, and sits on numerous boards as a non executive director.
She has been listed as one of the 100 most influential Black people in the UK.
After a successful career at the Bar (including as a legal commentator on the OJ Simpson verdict) she served as an Ombudsman both in the UK and internationally, including as a Commissioner at the Independent Police Complaints Commission and as the Complaints Commissioner of the Cayman Islands. She was the first Service Complaints Ombudsman for the UK Armed Forces, one of the most senior women and the most senior Black person in UK Defence.
She is the author of the legal thriller, Without Prejudice, describing the experiences of being a black female lawyer in Britain and is also an indictment of the legal system and privilege; screen rights have been optioned. Her second thriller, Until Proven Innocent, was published by Penguin on 16 March 2023.
Jacqueline Crooks
Jacqueline Crooks was born in Jamaica and grew up in 70s and 80s Southall, part of London’s migrant community, carving out a space through music, where she raved at dub reggae dances. She has carved out a career for herself in the community sector working with Black and minoritised charities. Her stories have been longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the BBC National Short Story Award. Named as a 2023 top ten debut author by the Guardian/The Observer. Her book, Fire Rush, is set in 1970s and 1980’s London, Bristol, and Jamaica and is about the role of women in the underground world of dub reggae.
Cathy Hayward
Cathy Hayward trained as a journalist and edited a variety of trade publications, several of which were so niche they were featured on Have I Got News for You. She then moved into the world of PR and set up an award-winning communications agency before ten years later, giving up the world of PR to become a bookseller. She took over Kemptown Bookshop in May 2022 with the aim of developing the shop into a community hub with events to engage new and established readers, celebrate local authors and support underrepresented writers. Devastated and inspired in equal measure by the death of her parents in quick succession, Cathy completed The Creative Writing Programme out of which emerged her debut novel The Girl in the Maze about the experience of mothering and being mothered. It won Agora Books’ Lost the Plot Work in Progress Prize 2020 and was longlisted for the Grindstone Literary Prize 2020 and Flash500 2020. It was published by Agora Books in November 2021. She has since written two further novels and is working on a fourth. Cathy lives in Brighton – sandwiched between the Downs and the sea – with her husband, three children, two rescue cats and one very lively Hungarian Vizsla puppy.
Philippa East
Philippa East grew up in Scotland and originally studied Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. After graduating, she moved to London to train as a Clinical Psychologist and worked in NHS mental health services for over ten years. Philippa now lives in the Lincolnshire countryside with her spouse and cat, and alongside her writing she continues to work as a psychologist and therapist. Her debut novel Little White Lies was longlisted for the Guardian’s “Not-The-Booker” prize and shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger. She has since published two further psychological suspense novels, Safe and Sound and I’ll Never Tell, and is currently working on her fourth.
Hannah Eaton
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Hannah Eaton has written and illustrated two acclaimed graphic novels: Naming Monsters (MyriadEditions, 2013) was shortlisted for the First Graphic Novel Prize and the Ninth Art Award, andBlackwood (Myriad 2020), a folk horror murder mystery of middle England, was featured in theGuardian’s Books of the Year 2020. She is currently working on a graphic memoir and an anthologyof contemporary ghost stories.
Her work has been published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Asylum, Doll Hospital and The InkingWoman, and she has worked with children and adults – including street sex workers, neurodivergentparents and children experiencing difficulties in the school system – for more than 20 years as an(autistic) autism specialist support worker, teacher, learning mentor and creative workshop facilitator.
Catherine Cooper
Catherine Cooper is Sunday Times Bestseller of thrillers The Chalet and The Chateau, her new book The Cruise was published by Harper Collins this autumn and she is currently working on a fourth thriller set in the Maldives. Her children are aged 20 and 18 and they all live in the South of France.
Jacqueline Roy
Jacqueline Roy was born and raised in London. Her father was Jamaican and her mother was English and she comes from a family of writers. She hated the pressure to conform at school and left early, so she did her degrees as a mature student and moved to Manchester to take up a full-time teaching post at Manchester Metropolitan University.
She lectured in English for many years, specialising in postcolonial literatures. She also taught creative writing at MMU’s Writing School. She is particularly interested in exploring racial identities and the ways in which those who are marginalised find strategies for fighting back. She is now a full-time writer of fiction. She has written six books for children, published mainly by Penguin Children’s books, and Walker Books, and two novels for adults, The Fat Lady Sings (republished by Penguin, 2021) and The Gosling Girl (published by Simon & Schuster, 2022). A third novel for adults will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2025.
Luce Brett
Luce Brett is the author of PMSL the first incontinence memoir. It was published by Green Tree an imprint of Bloomsbury in 2020. PMSL was her first book and has been influential with healthcare professionals as well as patients and many women and men have contacted her to say it made them feel seen and heard for the first time. As well as being an author and journalist Luce international advocate for women’s health. She has a strong history of saying the unsayable and challenging stigma around common but taboo conditions with kindness, insight and (sometimes bold) humour.
Andreina Cordani
Before writing her first novel, Andreina Cordani was a senior editor and writer for women’s magazines including Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan, where her assignments included interviewing gun-toting moms on the school run, ordering illegal DIY Botox online and learning to do the splits in eight weeks.
She lives on the Dorset coast with her family where she reads voraciously, occasionally makes TikTok videos and swims in the sea. She is the author of two dark thrillers for young adults, The Girl Who… and Dead Lucky and is currently working on an adult crime story.
Josie Lloyd
Josie Lloyd is the best selling author of over 20 novels and several parodies which she co-wrote with her husband, Emlyn Rees including ‘We’re Going On A Bar Hunt’ and ‘The Very Hungover Caterpillar’. Also with Emlyn she wrote the nineties rom-hit Come Together which was published in 26 languages and made into a Working Title Film. In 2018, after going through breast cancer, she wrote the novel ‘The Cancer Ladies’ Running Club’ which is currently in development as a film with Lionsgate. Hoping to inspire others with her positivity, she’s the patron of the charity Lobular Breast Cancer UK During the pandemic she discovered the joys of cold water swimming and wrote ‘Lifesaving For Beginners’, a novel about community and friendship. She lives in Brighton with Emlyn and their three daughters and sprollie, Ziggy.
Jenny McLachlan
Alexandra (AK) Benedict
Alexandra (AK) Benedict is a best-selling, award-winning writer of short stories, novels and scripts. Educated at Cambridge, Sussex, and Clown School, Alexandra was a rock singer, an actor, a creative writing lecturer, and a composer for film and TV before becoming a full-time writer and creative coach.
As AK Benedict, she writes acclaimed short stories, high-concept novels and award-winning audio drama for Big Finish, Audible UK, Audible US and BBC Sounds. She won the Scribe Award for her Doctor Who radio drama, The Calendar Man, and was shortlisted for the eDunnit Novel Award for The Beauty of Murder and the BBC Audio Drama Podcast Award for Children of the Stones. Her most recent novel, under the name Alexandra Benedict, is the bestselling The Christmas Murder Game. She is currently writing another Christmas mystery, a high-concept thriller and TV scripts. Alexandra lives on the south coast of England with writer, Guy Adams, their daughter, Verity, and dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.
Lorraine Brown
Lorraine Brown previously trained as an actress and has recently completed her final year of a postgraduate diploma in psychodynamic counselling. She lives in London with her partner and their 8-year-old son. Her debut novel, Uncoupling, was published by Orion Fiction in 2021 and will be out in the US with Penguin Random House on the 24th August 2021.
Kate Lee
Kate Lee is the author of six books for children including the best-selling Santa’s Suit which sold 291,000 copies in 7 languages and the popular Snappy pop-up series. Her short stories and poetry have won awards at Shoreham Litfest, the WRITE Festival and the Bath Flash Award and have been published in anthologies. Kate is a passionate believer in supporting other writers through her work as a freelance editor and mentor. Having gone back to school to take a PhD in Creative Writing, Kate is no stranger to balancing creativity and family. As a carer, she understands how can writing be therapeutic, especially following bereavement, but also the thing that may be squeezed out when life gets crazy. Kate, who lives in Horsham, West Sussex, is currently writing a ‘green wave’ Middle Grade novel involving a curse, a shady scientist and plenty of bees. As well as words, Kate is a lover of images and maps, and you’ll always find her drawing ideas (and encouraging others to do so, too). So long as Rupert her beloved but naughty puppy doesn’t get to the paper first…
Victoria Scott
Victoria Scott has been a journalist for two decades, working for outlets including the BBC, Al Jazeera, Time Out and the Telegraph. She lives on a Thames island with her husband, two children and a cat called Alice, and when she’s not writing she works as a university lecturer and copywriter. She has a degree in English from King’s College London and a Postgraduate Diploma in Broadcast Journalism from City University, London. Victoria’s debut novel, Patience, was a Booksellers’ Association Book of the Month. Her new book Grace comes out in July.
Sharon Duggal
Sharon Duggal writes novels and short stories. Her second novel, Should We Fall Behind (2020, Bluemoose Books) was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s 2021 Encore Award, selected for Between the Covers, BBC television’s flagship book show and chosen as a Prima Magazine Book of the Year. Her debut, The Handsworth Times was The Morning Star’s Fiction Book of the Year 2016 and selected as the Brighton City Reads in 2017. Her short fiction appears in various anthologies including The Book of Birmingham and Love Bites: Fiction Inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks.
Sharon grew up in Birmingham as part of a large Indian family. As well as being a writer, she is also one half of Radio Reverb’s long-running The Ruben and Sharon Show, the UK’s only regular radio show with a mum and son producer/presenter team.
Susan Allott
Susan grew up on the south coast of England and then moved north to study English at the University of Leeds. She had a brief spell living in Australia, where she was horribly homesick, only to return to the UK and meet an Australian man who she went on to marry. Her first novel was inspired by this part of her life.
Nominated for the 2021 New Blood Dagger, Susan’s debut, THE SILENCE, was published by Harper Collins in August 2020, to broad critical acclaim. THE SILENCE was translated into French, Italian and Polish, and in North America THE SILENCE was described by The Wall Street Journal as ’emotionally wrenching.’
Susan lives in south London with her family, where she is working on her second novel. Susan also works as a mentor and editor for aspiring authors.
Listen to Susan on our podcast.
Rosie Walker
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Rosie Walker is the author of two novels: The House Fire (2022) and Secrets of a Serial Killer (2020), both published by HarperCollins imprint One More Chapter. Rosie lives in Edinburgh with her husband Kevin, daughter Elsie and their dog Bella. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh and an undergraduate degree in Psychology from Lancaster University. She is currently working on her third novel.
Rebecca Ley
Rebecca has been a journalist for twenty years after starting her career at The Times Magazine and then moving to staff roles at other newspapers. Since going freelance in 2009 she’s written for a wide variety of outlets, including a column in The Guardian’s now-defunct Family section about her father’s vascular dementia, obituaries for The Times and regular scripts for the animation company Scriberia. She also recently ghosted Hope Not Fear, a memoir by the Syrian activist and filmmaker Hassan Akkad which was just published by Pan Macmillan.
For When I’m Gone is her first novel and it was published by Orion in September 2020. She’s got three kids and lives in Hackney, east London with them and her partner, also a journalist.
Nikki Smith
Nikki Smith studied English Literature at Birmingham University, before pursuing a career in finance where she worked for companies including an investment bank and a trampoline park. Following a ‘now or never’ moment, she applied for a Curtis Brown Creative course where she started writing her debut novel All In Her Head which was pre-empted by Orion in a two book deal. It went on to be an Amazon bestseller, was nominated for the Guardian ‘Not The Booker Prize’ and has been optioned for TV. Her second novel, Look What You Made Me Do was published on 1 April 2021. She is represented by Sophie Lambert at the C&W agency and lives near Guildford with her husband and two teenage daughters and a cat who thinks she’s a dog.
Lou Tondeur
After doing a Creative Writing MA at The University of East Anglia in the noughties, Lou Tondeur published The Water’s Edge and The Haven Home for Delinquent Girls with Headline Review, did a PhD, travelled around the world, started a family, and became a Creative Writing lecturer. Since then she has supported countless numbers of writers through mentoring and editorial feedback. Unusual Places, her first short story collection, came out in 2018 and she is currently working on her next novel. Lou lives near Brighton on the sunny south coast of England, teaches for the Open University
Kiley Dunbar
Kiley Dunbar had published 6 contemporary romantic comedies with her publisher Hera Canelo. She is Scottish and lives in the North of England with her partner and two children. Her debut, One Summer’s Night, was nominated for the Joan Hessayon Award for New Writing, and its sequel, One Winter’s Night, was shortlisted for the RNA’s Romantic Comedy Novel Award 2021. Kiley is a senior lecturer at the Manchester Writing School where she uses her real name Dr Kirsty Bunting and teachers courses on genre fiction and writing about relationships.
Kiley’s busy writing the sequel to her bestselling The Borrow a Bookshop Holiday (2021) which will be out on September 1st 2022.
Jo Clegg
Jo’s brief stint as a stand-up comic ended when a promoter told her she was really funny until she got on stage. After ten years as a producer in TV and radio comedy, Jo became a scriptwriter. She writes for children’s TV shows including BAFTA and Emmy-award winning Hey Duggee.
Her first novel The Summer Holiday features difficult-to-remove wetsuits, a weaponised macaroni cheese, adequacy issues, comparison, over-packing and regrettable impulsive acts. She lives in London with her family.
Eve Ainsworth
Eve Ainsworth is an award-winning and Carnegie nominated children’s author, for both middle grade and teen readers. She has vast experience working as a public speaker and creative workshop coordinator for schools, libraries and other events both nationally and internationally.
Eve was born and raised in Crawley, West Sussex and is one of seven children. After her degree, she had a varied background working within HR and Recruitment roles, before landing a job she loved – mentoring and supporting challenging and vulnerable students in a large secondary school. This inspired her first teen book 7 DAYS.
Eve is fiercely proud of her working class roots and her large, loud family. She still lives in Crawley with her husband, two young children and crazy dog.
Her first novel for adults, Duckling, was published by Penguin Random House this Spring 2022
Suhayla El Bushra
Suhayla El-Bushra writes for stage and screen. She was writer in residence at the National Theatre Studio from April 2015 to August 2016, during which time her adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide was staged in the Lyttelton Theatre. Other stage work includes Pigeons (Royal Court 2013 and tour), Cuckoo (Unicorn Theatre, 2014) The Kilburn Passion (Tricycle, 2014) and Arabian Nights (Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 2017). She has recently had commissions from Chichester Festival Theatre, the National Theatre and the Bridge Theatre. For screen, her credits include 2 series of C4’s Ackley Bridge, for which she is also an Executive Producer, and a short film for Film4.
Holly Race
Holly is an author and script editor, and has worked for companies including Working Title Films, Aardman Animations and Red Planet Pictures. She is a Faber Academy graduate, and her Young Adult trilogy, Midnight’s Twins, A Gathering Midnight and A Midnight Dark and Golden, is published by Hot Key Books. Having studied English at Oxford University, she now lives in her hometown of Cambridge, where she enjoys baking, trying not to kill plants, and travelling at short notice to far off places.
Beth Miller
I’ve published eight books with four different publishers: one of the Big Five, an indie, a digital first publisher, and a commercial non-fiction pile ’em high press. I’ve bumped across genres, from women’s commercial and reading group to psychological thriller to comedy. I had an agent, then managed to lose the agent. But I’ve brokered three book deals on my own since then.
I’ve taught creative writing for many years, including for Arvon and for the universities of Brighton and Surrey, and for New Writing South. I also work as a book coach for writers at all stages – 135 of them since 2015. I specialise in helping writers with their query letters and pitches. Some of my clients have gone on to considerably greater success than my own, and I’M FINE WITH THAT *sobs*
Listen to Beth on our podcast.
Rachel Walker Mason
Rachel Walker Mason is the recipient of a prestigious British Citizen Award for contribution to the arts, a bestselling author and mother of two young children. She was named a Woman Of The Year 2020 and is an ambassador for maternal mental health.
Named “a songwriting expert” by BBC Radio Four’s Today Programme and described as “one of the most talented songwriters in the industry” Rachel is also a multi-award-winning musician currently writing songs with Grammy winners, Billboard Hot 100 artists, alumni from The Voice UK and American Idol, Emmy winners, Oscar nominees, MOBO Award nominees and Independent Country Music Association Awards winners.
She is the only British musician to be inducted into the Indie Music Hall Of Fame, and hailed “an inspiration” by Prince Harry. Rachel is the only musician to have been crowned Freelancer Of
The Year and to be given a Community Champion Award for her work creating the international arts festival Unlock Your Talent during the coronavirus pandemic which garnered worldwide acclaim for its support and fundraising for mental health. She is also the youngest person to be made a Fellow of the London College of Music by Professional Achievement.
Kate Morrison
Kate Morrison’s debut novel A Book of Secrets was published in 2019 by Jacaranda Books. It tells the story of a girl from 16th century Ghana hunting for her lost brother through an Elizabethan underworld of spies, plots and secret Catholic printing presses. A Book of Secrets was longlisted for the Historical Writers Association Debut Crown Award 2020 and the Diverse Book Awards 2020. Kate started researching A Book of Secrets in 2003 and finally finished it 15 years and two children later. Many of her drafts were written while her babies napped. She now lives in West Sussex with her family and is trying to write another book set in Bronze Age Britain, in between lockdowns and homeschooling.
Gillian Harvey
Gill Harvey studied English literature and language at university and, after graduating in 2000, trained as a secondary school teacher. After eight years in education, she moved to France with her husband. She is a novelist and freelance writer, her first novel ‘Everything is Fine’ was published in May 2020 with Orion, and her second ‘Perfect on Paper’ is due for publication on 13 May 2021. She writes regularly for magazines and newspapers in the UK and US and has a regular column for ‘Writing Magazine.’ She has five children.
Listen to Gillian on our podcast.
Jo Lovett-Turner
Jo Lovett lives in London with her family.
She worked in Corporate Tax before taking a longer-than-expected career break to have more-than-expected children (five). She started writing romantic comedy when she realised that she was regularly begging her oldest son to let her do his English homework but she wasn’t actually that interested in haunted houses or Macbeth.
Jo was runner-up in the Good Housekeeping/ Orion First Novel Competition 2018 and shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Award 2019.
Her first novel, ‘The First Time We Met’, was published by Bookouture in November 2020 and her second, ‘The House Swap’, will be published in April 2021. Her third will be published in October 2021.
When she can escape from her laundry mountain, she enjoys reading, tennis and wine.
Laura Wilkinson
Laura has published six novels for adults (two under a pseudonym) and numerous short stories. Her contemporary fiction is published by Headline Accent. These novels are Crossing the Line, Skin Deep, The Family Line and Redemption Song. Crossing the Line was a Welsh Books Council book of the month and her latest, Skin Deep, has been widely praised, including a Not the Booker longlisting.
Alongside writing, she runs workshops on craft and has spoken at literary events nationwide. Over the past nine years she’s worked as a creative writing tutor for organisations including New Writing South and West Dean College, and as a structural editor and mentor for leading literary consultancies, coaching writers to competition shortlistings and publication.
‘There’s almost nothing better than helping a writer find their voice and develop a compelling story, whether they wish to be published or not. While everyone’s journey is unique, because I am an author, I have personal insight into and understanding of the pleasures and pains of writing.’
Lucy Brett
Lucy Brett suffers from Urinary incontinence which effects a third of women, including many young women (Lucy is 42) She began suffering after the birth of her first child 12 years ago. in the end she required surgery to resolve the problem. Lucy has written a book about her experience. Photography by Richard Cannon on Wednesday 6th May 2020
Lucy Brett was born in 1977 and learned about her nether regions from MORE magazine, other peoples’ big sisters, Tampax leaflets and her mother’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. In 2020 she wrote PMSL a groundbreaking, moving, heartbreaking, sometimes tough, but crucially funny and uplifting memoir about the impact of losing control of her pelvic floor after a traumatic delivery and rebuilding her life while she couldn’t control her bladder. Daring to go where many parenting books won’t, and unfailingly honest PMSL is als a long hard look at why all of us, dry or not, should bust the last great taboo in medicine – incontinence and leaking – as a matter of urgency.
She has spoken about her condition in print, online and on national radio, most recently on BBC Radio’s The Naked Podcast, where she stripped with the hosts to talk about how leaking affected everything from her ability to enjoy a party to her sex life. World Continence Week conveniently starts on her birthday each year. Find her on Twitter @lucebrett.
Listen to Luce on our podcast.
Louise Fein
Louise Fein is the author of People Like Us (entitled Daughter of the Reich in the US/Canada edition), her debut novel, which has been published in thirteen territories, was longlisted for the Not The Booker Prize 2020 and shortlisted for the RNA Historical Novel of the Year award 2021. She holds an MA in creative writing from St Mary’s University, London and lives in Surrey with her family. Her second novel, The Hidden Child will be published later this year.
Katy Massey
Are we home yet? Katy Massey’s memoir about her relationship with her mother was published in September 2020 by Jacaranda. It has been shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Portico Prize. She worked as a journalist for many years before completing a PhD on memoir and race at Newcastle University. Alongside her own work, she has guided and published numerous emerging writers and initiated her own Arts Council-funded literature projects. She has published two anthologies of memoir: Tangled Roots: True Life Stories About Mixed Race Britain, featuring 30-plus contributions, and Who are we now?a collection of first-person experiences of the 2016 Brexit referendum. She lives in East Sussex with her family and has just completed a novel.
Victoria Dowd
Victoria’s debut novel, The Smart Woman’s Guide to Murder, won the People’s Book Prize for fiction 2020/2021 and was In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel’s Book of the Year 2020. The second book in the series, Body on the Island, is nominated for the Page Turner’s Award 2021 and the TCK publishers Readers’ Choice Award 2021. Book 3 in the series, Tales of the Red Monkey, will be released on 16th September. Her books are a modern, darkly comic take on Golden Age crime fiction.
Victoria was awarded the Gothic Fiction prize for short fiction in 2019. She was the runner up in The New Writer’s writer of the year award and long-listed for The Willesden Herald International Short Story Competition. Her work has been published in many literary journals and magazines. She also writes the Adapting Agatha series, focusing on TV and film adaptations of Agatha Christie and regularly speaks at various festivals on this subject.
Originally from Yorkshire, she studied law at Cambridge and was a criminal law barrister appearing at the Old Bailey for many years. She is now co-convenor of the London chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association.
Elizabeth Haynes
Elizabeth is a former police intelligence analyst who lives in Norfolk with her husband and son. Her first novel, Into the Darkest Corner, was Amazon’s Best Book of the Year 2011 and a New York Times bestseller. Now published in 37 countries, it was originally written as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an online challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.
She has written a further three psychological thrillers—Revenge of the Tide, Human Remains and Never Alone—and two novels in the DCI Louisa Smith series, Under a Silent Moon and Behind Closed Doors.
Next came her highly praised historical novel The Murder of Harriet Monckton (a Sunday Times Summer Read) which is based on the 1843 unsolved murder of a young school teacher in Bromley, Kent.
Elizabeth’s latest novel, You, Me and the Sea is a contemporary story of love and redemption set on a remote, windswept Scottish island.
Nicola Gill
Nicola lives in London with her husband and two sons. At the age of five, when all of the other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers, she decided she wanted to be an author. Her ballet teacher was very relieved.
Nicola is the author of The Neighbours and We Are Family.
Zoë Somerville
Portraiture Portrait in Bath photographed by Beata Cosgrove