Matthew Beaumont is a Professor of English Literature at University College London and a Co-Director of UCL’s Urban Laboratory. He is the author of several books, including Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015), Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night (2021), and How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body (2024).
Dr Anita Sethi is an award-winning writer and critic and author of the acclaimed book I Belong Here: a Journey Along the Backbone of Britain which won a Books Are My Bag award and was nominated for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing, the Great Outdoors Award and Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize for writing evoking a strong sense of place. The Sunday Times review wrote: “Punchier and more political than most nature writing, this book is a thing of beauty”.
She has written columns, features and reviews for newspapers and magazines including the Guardian and Observer, Sunday Times, the i paper, Independent, Telegraph, BBC Wildlife, Vogue, New Statesman, Granta, Times Literary Supplement, among others. In broadcasting she has appeared on several BBC radio programmes.
She has been a Judge of the Women’s Prize, British Book Awards, Costa Book Awards, and Society of Authors Awards among others.
Laura Battle is Senior Editor on FT Weekend. She joined the FT in 2011 and worked as an editor on the House & Home desk and as the FT‘s deputy books editor prior to her current role.
Jim Crace is an English political fabulist and the multi prize-winning author of fourteen novels.
Ross Raisin is the author of four novels: A Hunger (2022), A Natural (2017), Waterline (2011) and God’s Own Country (2008). His work has won and been shortlisted for over ten literary awards. He won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award in 2009, and in 2013 was named on Granta’s once a decade Best of Young British Novelists list. In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. Find more on Ross, his books and teaching here: www.rossraisin.com
Simon Okotie is a fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of the acclaimed Absalon Trilogy, and his fiction and essays have appeared in Financial Times Weekend, Firmament and gorse and at The London Magazine, 3:AM Magazine and The White Review. He was a Creative Fellow at the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading for 2022-23, and is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at City, University of London, for 2023-24.
Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures at UCL. She is the author of Narrative in the Age of the Genome, alongside essays on science, literature, and colonialism. Outside academia, she worked as a journalist for the Statesman newspaper in Kolkata, reporting on issues to do with development, health, and climate.
Alexandra Harris is a literary critic, cultural historian, and Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Romantic Moderns, Virginia Woolf, and Weatherland; The Rising Down will be published in 2024. She reviews fiction for the Guardian and chaired the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2020.
Tomiwa Owolade is a contributing writer at the New Statesman. He has also written for the Times and the Sunday Times. He is the author of the forthcoming book This is Not America.
Julia Jordan is Associate Professor of 20th Century English Literature at UCL, where she teaches modern and contemporary literature. She has edited the work of B. S. Johnson, and has published two books and several essays, mostly about experimental literature and late modernist fiction. She is currently working on a new project, which largely about trees and what happens to the pastoral mode in twentieth-century literature.
Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor and writer who was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020 for outstanding service to literature over the course of a career. He currently writes on books and arts for international media including The Economist, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement and UnHerd, and was formerly Literary Editor and Senior Writer at The Independent. He chaired the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and then served as the prize’s Special Adviser. His reader’s guide to global fiction, The 100 Best Novels in Translation, is published by Galileo.
Alison Flood is comment and culture editor at the New Scientist. She is also the Observer’s thriller reviewer, and reads far too much science fiction and crime. She has judged book awards including the McIlvanney prize for the best Scottish crime novel of the year, and the British Book Awards.
Monique Roffey is an award winning Trinidadian born British writer of novels, essays, literary journalism and a memoir. Her most recent novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch (Peepal Tree Press), won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2020 and was longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. She is a co-founder of Writers Rebel within Extinction Rebellion, and a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Sana Goyal is Wasafiri’s Deputy and Reviews Editor. Formerly the Publicity Manager at Tilted Axis Press and the Digital Editor at Wasafiri, she now does Marketing and Outreach at Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry London, PBLJ, Brixton Review of Books, Vogue India, and elsewhere. She lives between Birmingham and Bombay and tweets @SansyG.
Dennis Duncan is a writer, translator and lecturer in English at University College London. His most recent book is Index, A History of the, Book Parts (co-edited with Adam Smyth). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and lives in London.
Adam Roberts is Professor of Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of twenty novels, almost all of them science-fiction, and an equivalent number of non-fictional works. His most recent works are the novel Purgatory Mount (Gollancz 2021) and the academic monograph Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors (Open Book Publishing 2021).
Mark Ford is a professor in the English Dept. at University College London. He is the author of monographs on Raymond Roussel and Thomas Hardy, and of three collections of essays, the most recent of which, This Dialogue of One, was awarded The Poetry Foundation’s 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. He is the editor of London: A History in Verse, as well as of the first two volumes of the Library of America Collected Poems of John Ashbery. His own collections of poetry include Landlocked (1992), Soft Sift (2001), Six Children (2011) and Enter, Fleeing (2018).
Bea Carvalho is the head fiction buyer at Waterstones. Based at the Piccadilly head office, she is responsible for the selection and promotion of new fiction titles for the chain’s 284 branches and website. She has been a part of the central buying team since 2011, initially working on non-fiction, and previously worked as a bookseller in Waterstones bookshops around London including Hampstead, Oxford Street, and The Economists’ Bookshop.