DR EMILY MACGREGOR, 2026

Dr Emily MacGregor is a writer, music historian, and broadcaster based at King’s College London. She appears regularly as a music expert on BBC Radio. After a childhood spent moving between various rural locations (Scotland, the North East, and the South West of England), she completed a doctorate in music at Oxford University, partly because of the excitingly cosmopolitan travel opportunities she’d been promised it would include. She duly then went further afield, with positions in Berlin, and at Harvard, before finding her way to London, where she initially taught at Royal Holloway. In a past life she played classical and jazz trombone.

Emily has written for the Guardian, Big Issue, and Gramophone, and her latest book, While the Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief, and Joy untangles the relationship between music and loss. Her writing is represented by Ben Dunn of DunnFogg.

Her first academic book, Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination: Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023; more recently, she co-edited Sonic Circulations: Music, Modernism, and the Politics of Knowledge with Emily I. Dolan and Arman Schwartz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). She has written numerous research articles, for one of which she won the 2019 Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association for an outstanding article by an early career scholar.

Communicating to wide audiences about music and culture is at the heart of her work. Alongside contributing to popular non-fiction, and writing programme notes for major venues, she regularly gives invited talks in her field, speaks at international conferences, and gives public talks for leading London orchestras. Alongside her writing and broadcasting work, she is Editor-at-Large, Classical Music, at Faber & Faber. Photo © Helena Cooke

JOHN WALSH, 2023

John Walsh has been a professional writer for 45 years, a journalist, memoirist, novelist, broadcaster and festival director. He was born in Wimbledon to Irish parents in 1953, grew up in south London and was educated at Exeter College, Oxford and University College, Dublin. In 1987, he became literary editor of the Evening Standard, and from 1988-1992 was literary editor and feature writer at The Sunday Times. In 1993, he joined the Independent as editor of the Magazine, and spent the next 20 years as Assistant Editor in a variety of roles, writing features, reviewing restaurants and interviewing famous people – everyone from Vaclav Havel to Dame Ninette de Valois, from Vanessa Redgrave to Ozzy Osbourne. In the early 1990s he tutored an Arvon Foundation course in Creative Journalism at Totleigh Barton. In 1996, he chaired the judging panel of the Forward Poetry Prize. From 1997 to 1999, he was editorial director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. From 1998 to 2015, he could be heard, alongside Sebastian Faulks and James Walton, on the popular Radio 4 book quiz show, The Write Stuff. Since 2007 he has been President of the Authors’ Club. He is the author of three memoirs, The Falling Angels: an Irish Romance (1999), Are You Talking To Me? A Life in the Movies (2003) and the recently published Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World (2022). His novel Sunday at the Cross Bones (2007) was short-listed for both the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. John is married, has three grown-up children, Sophie, Max and Clementine, and lives in London and West Sussex. photo © Bryony Shearmur

RAFFAELLA BARKER, 2021

Raffaella Barker is the acclaimed author of nine novels, including Hens Dancing, Summertime, Come and Tell Me Some Lies, and From a Distance.  All are published by Bloomsbury. When she’s not writing fiction, Raffaella lectures in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has taught numerous short courses in creative writing, including the Guardian masterclass, The Arvon Foundation, and weeks  around the world from Villa Cetinale in Tuscany to Moniak Moor in Scotland, and El Fenn in Marrakech. She lives in Norfolk by the sea. 

HILARY BOYD, 2019

Hilary Boyd trained as a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital, then as a marriage guidance counsellor. After a degree in English Literature in her thirties she moved into health journalism, and published six non-fiction books on health-related subjects before turning to fiction. Thursdays in the Park, her first novel - published when she was 62 - sold over half a million ebooks and knocked E L James off the top of the Kindle chart. Hilary lives in West Sussex, by the sea, with her husband, film-maker, Don Boyd.

AMY LIPTROT, 2017

Amy Liptrot has published her work with various magazines, journals and blogs and she has written a regular column for Caught by the River out of which The Outrun has emerged. As well as writing for major newspapers including the Guardian and the Observer, Amy has worked as an artist’s model, a trampolinist and in a shellfish factory. The Outrun was awarded the 2016 Wainwright Prize and was shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Prize.

SALENA GODDEN, 2025

Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning novelist, poet and broadcaster of Jamaican-Irish mixed heritage. Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death won the Indie Book Awards for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Her new full poetry collection With Love, Grief and Fury and literary childhood memoir Springfield Road - A Poets Childhood Revisited were published with Canongate with a double book launch in May 2024. Her work has been widely published, anthologised and broadcast on BBC radio, TV and film. Rough Trade Books published a hardback edition of Pessimism is for Lightweights - 30 pieces of Courage and Resistance in 2023. The title poem is on permanent display at The Peoples History Museum, Manchester.  

Her poem ‘While Justice Waits’ was highly commended and published by The Forward Prize 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex. She is a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and Patron of LIVEwire Poetry — a new UK poetry organisation specialising in writer development and live events. A consistent supporter of the work of other poets, writers and artists, Salena Godden co-hosts and curates a monthly arts and culture radio show and podcast Roaring 20’s Radio for Soho Radio with art journalist Amah-Rose Abrams and poet Matt Abbott.

Salena Godden is one of Britain’s best-loved and foremost poets whose electrifying live performances have earned her a devoted following.

LOUISA YOUNG, 2022

Louisa Young is a writer and songwriter whose twelve novels include the award-winning My Dear I Wanted to Tell You trilogy. She’s a Londoner, a former journalist, a singer, a feminist, a reader, and ‘a masterly storyteller’ – The Washington Post. She has also written memoir, cultural history, and biography, and made an album. She was half of the children’s author Zizou Corder (with her daughter Isabel Adomakoh Young), and half of the band Birds of Britain (with Alex Mackenzie).

She is currently working on three novels continuing The Cazalet Chronicles, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, to be published from 2026 by Mantle (MacMillan). Her most recent novel is Twelve Months And A Day (Borough Press): ‘A tale of two love stories with a supernatural twist . . poignant and sad as well as funny, and beautifully written and imagined’ — Monique Roffey. Her ‘heartbreaking’, ‘spectacular’, ‘unflinching’, ‘bruising’, ‘brilliant’, ‘honest as the morning after’ memoir, You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol, is out in paperback. Her debut album is also called You Left Early.

Louisa has taught at Arvon, Skyros, Moniack Mhor, Eilean Shona, at Guardian Masterclasses, and for Birkbeck (University of London) as well as privately. She has been a Visiting Specialist Lecturer in Creative Non Fiction at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Her work is published in 32 languages, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. photo © Habie Schwarz

POLLY DEVLIN, 2020

Polly Devlin is a writer, broadcaster, film-maker, art critic and conservationist.  She was born in a remote area in Co.  Tyrone in the 1940s; there was no electricity or telephones in the region and her perspective on life was informed by this atavistic childhood.  Her first job was as Features editor on Vogue, and as a columnist for the New Statesman; she  had her own page in the Evening Standard when she was twenty-four.She worked for American Vogue  under the legendary editor Diana Vreeland in Manhattan as Feature Editor  travelling all over the world and interviewing (Barbra Streisand, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, among others) and working with many photographers including Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn. She attended the National Film School and later directed a one-hour documentary The Daisy Chain. She wrote on art for the International Herald Tribune and short stories and a play for the BBC. She was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 1994. She was an adjunct professor teaching Creative Non-fiction at Barnard College, Columbia University New York. She and her late husband had a passionate interest in conservation and turned their land in Somerset into one of the best conservation sites in England. A Year in the Life of an English Meadow is an account of how they did this.  Her latest book Writing Home  is a collection of essays .

FREYA NORTH, 2018

Freya North is the best-sellling author of 14 novels which have been translated into many languages. She gave up a PhD to write fiction and her first novel Sally was published in 1996 to great acclai. The winner of the Romantic Novel of the Year Award (for Pillow Talk). Freya’s much-loved and commercially successful novels can be best described as ‘domestic drama’ for their focus on families, love, lust and loss - a strong female leads. A passionate reader since childhood, in 2012 she set up the Hertford Children’s Book Festival and she judged the 2018 Costa Book Awards. Born in London, she now lives in Hertfordshire countryside with 3 horses, 2 dogs, 5 sheep and 2 teenagers. Currently, Freya is working on screenplays and her 15th novel.