Ones Who Flew The Nest

Isabelle Kenyon is the Managing Director of Manchester publishing house 'Fly on the Wall Press', and was named a Leader of the Year by the Bookseller in 2025. Founded in 2018, she has led Fly on the Wall Press from Small Press of the Year finalist status at the British Book Awards 2021-23 to their win in the North, in 2024!She is the MA Module Leader for 'Publishing in the 21st Century' at Arts University Bournemouth, and the author of psychological thriller 'The Dark Within Them' and poetry collections including Growing Pains (Indigo Dreams).​ She previously coordinated the Northern Fiction Alliance and runs PR campaigns for writers and publishers under Kenyon Author Services (www.kenyonauthorservices.co.uk).Helen Kennedy is Mancunian writer with an MA in Creative Writing in Oxford. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Bristol Prize (2022) , the TSS Cambridge Prize (2021) Katie Hale is the author of a novel, My Name is Monster, and two poetry pamphlets. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Munster Chapbook Prize, and Prole Laureate Competition. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Katie also runs Dove Cottage Young Poets for Wordsworth Grasmere, and is a Core Team Member of the Writing Squad. In 2022, she won the Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction for her second novel – and her debut poetry collection, White Ghosts, comes out with Nine Arches in March 2023. Louise Finnigan is a short story-writer and novelist from Manchester. She has been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Cambridge story prize and the Bristol prize. Her story Muscle and Mouth made its debut with Fly on The Wall Press as part of their 2021 shorts series. Jacqueline Ward is a writer from the Oldham. She is a psychologist and her debut NOVEL, PERFECT TEN, was published by Corvus Atlantic Books in 2018. Her second NOVEL, HOW TO PLAY DEAD, was published in November 2019.

"An evocative and unflinching story which shines a light on fractured families, love, and regret, all seeped in Manchester's past, present and uncertain future. Incredibly moving and beautifully written, I loved it." - Gaynor Jones on 'The People's History Museum is Closed by Helen Kennedy.; "Ivy Wife is delicately spare, beautifully written and hauntingly melancholic tale about female identity in the face of a shapeless loss, that will linger long after the last line." - Lara Williams, Author of Treats, Supper Club and The Odyssey on 'Ivy Wife' by Louise Finnigan