Tricia Wastvedt

Tricia Wastwedt’s novel, The River (Penguin 2004), was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction, short listed for the Author’s Club prize and the Prince Maurice Prize. She also teaches at Bath Spa University on the post-graduate creative writing programme. She is an editor for the Writers’ Workshop and also helps authors prepare manuscripts for submission to agents.

Gerard Woodward

Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961. He dropped out of a fine art course at Falmouth School of Art to study social anthropology at the LSE. His first collection of poetry, Householder, was published in 1991 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. His first novel, August, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. His second, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. A fourth collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians, appeared in 2005, and was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize.. His most recent novel, A Curious Earth, completes his trilogy of novels about the Jones family. 2008 sees the publication of his first collection of short stories, Caravan Thieves.

Christine Purkis

Christine Purkis has published six children's novels, as well as short stories and poems. She has just completed her first adult novel and holds a Masters in Creative Writing. Her many years of varied teaching experience includes the Certificate In Creative Writing at Bristol University.

Sophie Hannah

Sophie Hannah is a bestselling crime fiction writer and poet. Her psychological thrillers Little Face, Hurting Distance and The Point of Rescue have sold 200,000 copies in the UK, and are also published or about to be published in America, Portugal, Spain, Norway, Turkey, Poland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Croatia, Italy, Germany, France, Holland, Bulgaria and Romania, with several more foreign rights deals under negotiation. Little Face was longlisted for the 2007 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award and the IMPAC Award. Hurting Distance is currently longlisted for the 2008 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.

Sophie’s fifth collection of poetry, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award, and in 2004 she won first prize in the Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for her suspense story The Octopus Nest, which is now published in her first collection of short stories The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets.

Sophie’s poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is thirty-six and lives in West Yorkshire with her husband and two children.

Richard Francis

Richard Francis has published nine novels, including Taking Apart the Poco Poco, Fat Hen, and Prospect Hill. He also writes non-fiction, including biographies of the founder of Shakerism, Ann Lee, and of the colonial American writer and judge, Samuel Sewall. He is currently writing a book about the Fruitlands utopian community, an eccentric enterprise in 1840s Massachusetts which lasted for a mere six months and included among its members the eleven-year-old Louisa May Alcott. In 1993, Richard Francis inaugurated the MA in Novel Writing at Manchester University, and since 1999 he has been Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where his students have included Tricia Wastvedt, Mo Hayder, Jenni Mills and Nikita Lalwani. He broadcasts regularly on such programmes as Front Row and Open Book.

Katie Fforde

Katie Fforde lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and some of her three children. Recently her old hobbies of ironing and housework have given way to singing, Flamenco dancing and husky racing. She claims this keeps her fit. Going Dutch is her thirteenth novel.

Katharine Reeve

Katharine Reeve a commissioning editor with over 15 years of experience in the area of non-fiction books and of helping first time authors prepare and edit proposals and manuscripts. Author of Jane Austen in Bath (NYRB/ Little Bookroom, 2006) and co-author of the forthcoming Rough Guide to Food (Penguin Books, 2009), she is an experienced Senior Lecturer of English and Creative Studies.

Tim Liardet

Tim Liardet is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and has produced five collections of poetry. His third collection Competing with the Piano Tuner was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and longlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1998 and his fourth—To the God of Rain— a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003. Tim was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2002. He has reviewed poetry for such journals as The Independent, The Guardian, Poetry Review and PN Review and has recently been the Poet-in-Residence at The Guardian. The Blood Choir, his fifth collection, won an Arts Council England Writer’s Award as a collection-in-progress in 2003, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2006 and shortlisted for the 2006 TS Eliot Prize.

Carrie Etter

Originally from Normal, Illinois, at nineteen Carrie Etter moved to southern California and obtained her BA in English from UCLA and MFA in creative writing and PhD in English from the University of California, Irvine. Her writing interests range widely, including lyric, prose, and avant garde poetry, and her poems have appeared in the UK and US in such magazines as Aufgabe, Court Green, The New Republic, Poetry Review, Seneca Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. Her first collection, The Tethers, will be published by Seren Books in summer 2009, and her second, Divining for Starters, by Shearsman Books in 2010. A regular reviewer of contemporary poetry for the TLS and other journals, she has been a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University since 2004.