Six authors, six voices from around the world
Our friendly, inclusive gatherings highlight emerging talents and rising stars of the literary world alongside seasoned authors. Meet this year’s electric lineup, from speculative fiction authors to poets, comic novelists, and modern gothic storytellers.
“His gift as a writer – of plays, poetry, documentaries – is for turning life’s base metal into gold.”
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Lemn Sissay is a BAFTA-nominated, award-winning writer and broadcaster. He has authored collections of poetry and plays and his memoir My Name Is Why was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. His Landmark poems are visible in London, Manchester, Huddersfield and Addis Ababa. He has been made an Honorary Doctor by the universities of Manchester, Kent, Essex, Huddersfield and Brunel, and in 2019 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He received an MBE in 2010 and an OBE in 2021 for services to literature and charity. In 2023, Sissay was awarded the Freedom of the City of London. He is British and Ethiopian.
“The Dolls, in Jennifer Russell’s magnificent translation, is a literary page-turner: haunting, mesmerizing, and unforgettable in all its grotesque glory.”
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Ursula Scavenius is a writer based in Copenhagen. She is a graduate of the Danish Academy of Creative Writing and holds a Master’s in comparative literature and Italian from the University of Copenhagen. She debuted in 2015 with the short story collection Fjer (Feathers), which won the Bodil and Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize and was nominated for the Montana Prize for Fiction. Her second book, Dukkerne, was published in January 2020. It was highlighted by the BBC 4 and shortlisted for the Edvard P. Prize that same year, as was Feathers in 2015. Ursula Scavenius was granted the three-years Scholarship from the Danish Art Foundation 2020-2023.
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Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic. His most recent poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader (2023) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. His second collection, As Slow As Possible (2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and The Irish Times Book of the Year. His first collection Paper Scissors Stone (2011), won the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize. He was shortlisted twice for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, and a winner of Northern Writers Awards for Poetry and Fiction, Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and POETRY’s Editors Prize for Reviewing. His debut novel was Diamond Hill (2021). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
“Lucidly and elegantly, Fan uses metaphors of reading and writing to explore some of the most elemental themes of the human condition.”
“With ‘The Daddy Thing’, Mead-Brewer has written a modern fairy tale of the highest literary merit. Like the witch that cages children, or the wolf that swallows the grandma, the brutality of ‘The Daddy Thing’ is at once laid bare and cleverly disguised.”
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K.C. Mead-Brewer is a dark fiction author living in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. She's a graduate of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop and of Tin House's 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction. Her short story “The Hidden People” won the 2020 Montana Prize in Fiction, and her short story “The Daddy Thing” was one of Electric Literature’s 32 most-read stories of the decade. Her debut novel is currently out on submission.
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Johanna Sinisalo is a Finnish author and screenwriter. Called ”the queen of Finnish speculative fiction”, she has won among others the Finlandia Prize and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Her nine novels and a number of short prose items have been translated into more than twenty languages, including English, Spanish, French and German. In her works Sinisalo offers the reader enchanting stories in fantastically twisted worlds of myth and folklore, dystopias, psychological thrillers and horror, with undercurrents of societal topics, like equality and environmental issues.
Photo credit: Katri Kallio
“Stephen Buoro’s tale of a teenager in Nigeria, hanging with his friends and hankering after white girls, ticks all the boxes of a literary blockbuster.”
“Lingering questions are Johanna Sinisalo’s forte. She likes to zero in on truths that refuse to settle into one possible meaning, preferring to occupy a place where seemingly irreconcilable ideas can overlap.”
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Stephen Buoro was born in Nigeria in 1993. He has a degree in Mathematics, an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing also from the University of East Anglia. He is a recipient of the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. He was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s ten ‘Writers to Watch in Spring 2023’ and by The Observer as one of the ‘10 Best New Novelists for 2023’. His debut novel, The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa, was lauded by The Economist as being ‘among the best’ coming-of-age stories in contemporary African literature. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Nero Book Awards in the ‘Debut Fiction’ category and is a finalist for the L. A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Stephen lives in Norwich, United Kingdom.