The Writers’ Potted Biographies

Jemma Wayne is the author of three novels: After Before, Chains of Sand, and her latest thriller, To Dare (2021). She has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for both The Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize and the Waverton Good Read Award. Jemma’s journalism has appeared in National Geographic, The Huffington Post, The Evening Standard, The Independent on Sunday, and The Jewish Chronicle among others. Her stage play, Negative Space, ran in 2009 to critical acclaim. She lives in London.

jemmawayne.com

Louis de Bernières is well known internationally as a writer of prize winning novels and short stories: Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994), Birds Without Wings (2004), and A Partisan's Daughter (2008) among others. His collections of warm and witty short stories include Notwithstanding (2010) and Labels (2019). He returns to King’s Lynn with last year’s title, The Autumn of the Ace (2021), telling the story of a family after the Second World War. He lives in Norfolk and as well as writing, plays the flute, mandolin, clarinet and guitar.

The distinguished poet, novelist and critic, John Lucas, is Professor Emeritus at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent. He is the author of many academic works, including studies of Dickens and Ivor Gurney, and has published seven books of his own poetry. His novels include The Good That We Do (2000) and 92 Acharnon Street (2007), the latter two blending fiction, memoir and social history. Waterdrops (2011) is a poignant story from wartime Malta, the mystery of which is revealed forty years later. His latest novel, The Life in Us (2021), is about ordinary people learning how to cope in the extraordinary times of the 20^th century.

Alison Moore is the author of five novels, and other books of short stories which received awards. Her first novel, The Lighthouse (2012), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the McKitterick Prize. Both this and her second novel, He Wants (2014), were Observer Books of the Year. Her third and fourth novels received critical acclaim, as has her most recent, The Retreat (2021), perhaps her best book so far. She has become a master of atmosphere with worrying and sometimes alarming tension. Alison is an Honorary Lecturer at Nottingham University.

alison-moore.com

James Wilson is a London-based author of six novels. His previous are all set in the past, but his new thriller, Coyote Fork (2020), is set very much in the present, exploring the consequences of the algorithms and surveillance of Big Tech in an increasingly duplicitous online world. James is also a writer of stage plays and a scriptwriter of television films. 

He lives in London.

jameswilsonauthor.com

Peter Benson is a novelist, poet, writer of screenplays and short stories with too many prizes and awards to list here. He has published eleven novels. Benson was last with us with his novel, The South In Winter, in 2018, when he went down a storm. His latest, The Stromness Dinner, set on Orkney, is an unlikely love story between food, sex and travel.

peterbenson.net

Kathy O’Shaughnessy has edited numerous magazines, including The Literary Review and Vogue. She has reviewed for The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent,The New Statesman and others. After writing short stories, Kathy published her first novel, In Love with George Eliot (2019), the compelling story of England’s greatest woman novelist. Its publication was timed to coincide with the bicentenary of Eliot’s birth. The book is written with a great and infectious passion and for many critics and readers was the debut novel of the century.

Robert Edric grew up in and around Sheffield, and still lives in Yorkshire. He has published 28 novels, including The Broken Lands, A New Ice Age (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and runner-up to the Guardian Fiction Prize), and a trilogy of crime novels: Cradle Song, Siren Song and Swan Song. He is one of the most critically admired novelists of his generation. His titles are always well received – most recently Field Service (2015) and Mercury Falling (2018) set in 1954 Fenland. In 2020, Shoestring Press published an autobiography, My Own Worst Enemy: Scenes From A Sheffield Childhood, which was described as "a small masterpiece”.