Susmita Bhattacharya is an award-winning author and creative writing lecturer. Her debut novel, The Normal State of Mind (Parthian, 2015, BEE Books, India 2016) was long-listed for the Word to Screen Prize at the Mumbai Film Festival, 2018. Her short story collection, Table Manners (Dahlia Publishing, 2018) won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection (2019) and was a finalist  for the Hall & Woodhouse DLF Prize, 2019. Her short stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4. She teaches creative writing at Winchester University and facilitates the ArtfulScribe Mayflower Young Writers programme in Southampton and has been involved in several Mayflower 400 projects in 2020. She is a mentor on Dahlia Book’s mentoring programme for new writers of colour, The Middle Way Mentoring Project. She is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the Word Factory. She lives in Winchester. You can find Susmita on Twitter @Susmitatweets

Aiysha Jahan is a TCK who grew up in Dubai and has lived and worked around the world. She enjoys travelling most of all and writes fiction and essays that explore identity and belonging. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. From 2023-24 she was a Research Fellow in the Diverse Capacities project. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Wasafiri and elsewhere. Her collection of short stories that explores belonging and unbelonging in Dubai is out on submission. You can find Aiysha on Twitter @AiyshaJahan