Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited thirty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories in chapbook format. Forthcoming, from Confingo Publishing, is Paris Fantastique, and Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books (Salt).Alan Beard has published two story collections, Taking Doreen Out of the Sky (Picador, 1999) and You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal Street Press, 2010). He has had numerous stories in magazines and anthologies, most recently in Digbeth Stories, Litro, Leon, trampset, Outside Left and Best Microfiction 2024. He is a longstanding member of Tindal Street Fiction Group, who celebrated their fortieth anniversary in 2023.Kevin Boniface is a writer and artist from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire.Paul Brownsey is a former philosophy lecturer at Glasgow University. His first collection, His Steadfast Love and Other Stories, was published by Lethe Press, New Jersey, USA, and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards.Claire Carroll is a writer and PhD researcher whose work explores how experimental short fiction writing can reimagine how humans relate to the natural and non-human world. Her short stories have been published by journals including The White Review, The London Magazine, Gutter, 3:AM, and Lunate, and Short Fiction Journal. Her debut collection, The Unreliable Nature Writer, was released in June 2024 by Scratch Books.ECM Cheung is a London-based, Birmingham-bred writer, filmmaker, pamphleteer and bookseller.Jonathan Coe is the author of fifteen novels, the latest of which is The Proof of My Innocence.Rosie Garland writes poetry, long and short fiction, and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. Poetry collection What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2021. Her latest novel, The Fates (Quercus) is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Fates, and her first collection of short fiction is forthcoming with Fly On The Wall Press in January 2025. In 2023, she was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today.Kerry Hadley-Pryce lives and writes in the Black Country, UK. She has a PhD in creative writing and teaches creative and professional writing at the University of Wolverhampton. She co-edited Writing Under Fire: Poetry and Prose from Ukraine & the Black Country, and has short stories published in Best British Short Stories 2023, Takahe Magazine, Fictive Dream and The Incubator. She has had three novels published by Salt Publishing: The Black Country, Gamble, and God’s Country. Lie of the Land is her fourth novel.Timothy J Jarvis is a writer with an interest in the antic and strange. His novel, The Wanderer, was first released in summer 2014 by Perfect Edge Books and republished by Zagava in 2022. Short fiction has appeared in various venues and in 2023 a collection, Treatises on Dust, was published by Swan River Press. He lives in Bedford.Cynan Jones is an acclaimed fiction writer from the west coast of Wales. His work has appeared in over twenty countries and in journals and magazines including Granta, Freeman’s and the New Yorker. He has also written a screenplay for the hit crime drama Hinterland, a collection of tales for children, and a number of stories for BBC Radio. He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous awards and won, among other prizes, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award and the BBC National Short Story Award.Bhanu Kapil lives in Cambridge, where she is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. Her last book of poetry, How To Wash A Heart, won the TS Eliot Prize. Two new editions of Incubation: a space for monsters were published in 2023 by Prototype (UK) and Kelsey Street Press (USA).Sonya Moor writes and translates short fiction. Her work is published in literary reviews and anthologies, including Best British Short Stories 2022, and recognised for awards such as the Cinnamon Literature Award, Seán O’Faoláin International Short Story Competition and Bridport Short Story Prize. Her collection The Comet and Other Stories is published by Cōnfingō, and her translation of Albertine Sarrazin’s The Crib and Other Stories is upcoming from Cōnfingō. www.sonyamoor.comAlison Moore's first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards (New Writer of the Year), winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were Observer Books of the Year. Her short fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories. Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives near Nottingham with her husband Dan and son Arthur.Gregory Norminton is the author of five novels and two collections of short stories. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He lives with his wife and daughter in SheffieldNicholas Royle is the author of Telepathy and Literature (1990), The Uncanny (2003) and Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), as well as books about EM Forster, Jacques Derrida, William Shakespeare and Hélène Cixous. He has also published two novels, Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017), and a memoir, Mother (2020). He is co-author with Andrew Bennett of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Sixth edition, 2023) and This Thing Called Literature (Second edition, 2024). ‘Strangers Meet We When’ is concerned with the first meeting between Enid Blyton and Royle’s grandmother, Lola Onslow, who illustrated several of Blyton’s fairy books in the early 1920s. The story originally appeared as the final section of David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine (Manchester University Press, 2023).Cherise Saywell was born and brought up in Australia. She has published two novels, Desert Fish and Twitcher (both Vintage). Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in periodicals and anthologies including Mslexia, A Short Affair (Scribner) and Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (Tangent Books). Her story ‘Guests’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2023. She lives in Edinburgh with her family.Kamila Shamsie was born and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of eight novels including Burnt Shadows, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, A God in Every Stone, shortlisted for the Women’s Bailey’s Prize and the Walter Scott Prize, and Best of Friends, shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards. Her seventh novel, Home Fire, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017, shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the London Hellenic Prize. Her story ‘Churail’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.Ben Tufnell is a writer and curator based in London. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art, in particular on artforms that engage with ideas of landscape and nature. His short stories have been published by Conjunctions, Litro, Lunate, Nightjar Press, Storgy and Structo, amongst others. His debut novel, The North Shore, was published by Fleet (Little, Brown) in 2023.Charlotte Turnbull’s work has been published as part of the Galley Beggars Short Story Prize 2023, as well as by Nightjar Press, New England Review, McNeese Review, Denver Quarterly, 3:AM Magazine and others.Cate West is a writer, teacher, content designer and editor. She lives in the Midlands. Her MA in Creative Writing is from Manchester Metropolitan University, and she was 2022’s Laura Kinsella Fellow at the National Centre of Writing. Her short fiction has been published by Nightjar Press, Lunate, Janus Literary, Northern Gravy and The Amphibian, among others. Her debut novel is on submission. Twitter: @c8west Agent: Charlotte Atyeo at Greyhound Literary.
