Gita Ralleigh is a poet, writer and doctor born to Indian immigrant parents in London. She teaches creative writing to science undergraduates at Imperial College and has an MA in Creative Writing and an MSc in Medical Humanities. Her poetry books are A Terrible Thing (Bad Betty Press, 2020) and Siren (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). Her debut children’s novel The Destiny of Minou Moonshine was published by Zephyr/Head of Zeus in July 2023. You can find her on Twitter as @storyvilled and on Instagram as @gita_ralleigh

Prajwal Parajuly, the son of a Nepali mother and a Nepali-Indian father, is the author of The Gurkha’s Daughter: Stories and Land Where I Flee, a novel. His works have been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Mogford Prize in the UK, the Emile Guimet Prize and the First Novel Prize in France, and longlisted for the Story Prize in the US. He was a judge for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2018 and 2023.

Catherine Menon is the author of Fragile Monsters, published in April 2021 by Viking. Her debut short story collection, Subjunctive Moods, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018. She has a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in creative writing from City University, for which she won the annual prize. She has led a number of workshops and tutorials, including sessions for Spread The Word, the Northern Short Story Festival, the Leicester Writes festival and the LSE Literature Festival. She’s won or been placed in a number of competitions, including the Fish, Bridport, London Short Story, Bare Fiction, Willesden Herald, Asian Writer, Leicester Writes, Winchester Writers Festival and Short Fiction Journal awards. Her work has been published in a number of literary journals, including The Good Journal and Asian Literary Review and has been broadcast on radio. 

Saad Z Hossain lives in Dhaka and writes science fiction, fantasy and satire. All of it is made up. His three books are: Escape from Baghdad!, Djinn City, and the recently published Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday. His publishers include Unnamed Press, Aleph, Bengal Lights Books, Bengal Publications and Tor.com (Macmillan), and his work has been translated into French by Agullo Editions. His short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies such as Made to Order: Robots and Revolutions, A Djinn Falls in Love, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Vol 12, and the Apex Book of World SF Vol 4.

Sabyn Javeri is Senior Lecturer of Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She is the author of Hijabistan (Harper Collins: 2019) and the novel Nobody Killed Her (Harper Collins: 2017) and has edited two anthologies of student writing titled, The Arzu Anthology of Student Voices (Vol I & II. HUP: 2019, 2018). Her writing has been widely anthologized and published in the South Asian Review, London Magazine, Wasafiri, Oxonian Review, Trespass, and World Literature, amongst other publications, and she writes a monthly column for 3QuarksDaily on gender and identity. She has a Masters from the University of Oxford and a doctorate from the University of Leicester. Her research interests include transnational feminism, South Asian literature and creative writing.

Farah Ghuznavi is a writer, reviewer, translator, and development worker. Her stories have been published in 11 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, as well as in her native Bangladesh. Writer in Residence with Commonwealth Writers in 2013, she has written several articles on the craft of writing. In addition to having work featured in numerous anthologies, Farah has published a collection of stories titled Fragments of Riversong (Daily Star Books, 2013), and edited the Lifelines anthology (Zubaan Books, 2012). She is currently working on her new short story selection and enjoys meeting fellow book nerds on Instagram @farahghuznavi

Awais Khan is a TEDx Speaker and the award-winning author of No Honour, Someone Like Her (Orenda Books) and In the Company of Strangers (Hera Books and Simon & Schuster India). He is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and Durham University and has studied creative writing with Faber Academy in London. He has been longlisted for the Short Story Dagger and shortlisted for the Dead Good Reader Awards. He has served on the judging panel of Cheshire Novel Prize and Gwyl Crime Cymru Novel Prize. He has appeared on BBC World Service, Dubai Eye, Voice of America, Cambridge Radio among other television and radio networks and he teaches a very popular online creative writing course to aspiring writers worldwide. He is represented by Annette Crossland. 

Amita Murray is a novelist and short story writer, based in London. Her novel The Trouble with Rose came out with Harper Collins in 2019. Her Arya Winters series will come out with Polis/Agora soon. Amita’s short story collection Marmite and Mango Chutney won the SI Leeds Literary Prize in 2016. The collection was written under a Leverhulme writer-in-residence grant at University College London, and it navigates the comedy and tragedy of cultural encounters. Stories have appeared in Aesthetica, Brand, Wasafiri, the Berkeley Fiction Review, SAND (Berlin) and others. Amita is a Creative Writing Lecturer at the New College of the Humanities, and teaches the advanced fiction masterclass at CityLit London. She has taught fiction at the University of East Anglia and held a residency with Plymouth University/Literature Works. She regularly works with libraries and arts organizations, and has a special interest in seeing more diversity in publishing.

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, a work of nonfiction, Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.  

Amanthi Harris grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka and in London, UK. She studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and has degrees in Law and Chemistry from Bristol University. Her novel Beautiful Place was published by Salt Publishing (UK) and Pan Macmillan India. Lantern Evening, a novella, won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 and was published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies including Best British Short Stories 2020 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She currently lives in the mountains of southern Spain. You can find her on: amanthiharris.com.