Advisory Board
Shelley Weiner
Shelley Weiner is an acclaimed novelist, short-story writer and journalist who, over the years, has established a reputation as an inspirational creative-writing tutor and nurturer of new talent. Her novels include A Sisters’ Tale, The Last Honeymoon, The Joker, Arnost and The Audacious Mendacity of Lily Green. Short stories have appeared in various anthologies and on BBC Radio 4.
Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, Shelley trained and worked as a newspaper reporter. After her move to London in 1977, she worked as a journalist, PR writer, and editor in a publishing house before turning to fiction. Soon after the publication of her first novel in 1991, she embarked on her ongoing mission to offer tools and support to other new writers. Since then, Shelley has taught fiction for institutions such as Birkbeck College, Anglia Ruskin University, the Open University, the British Council and Faber Academy.
Joanna Pocock
Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrenderand in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Fellowship.
Ian Thomson
Ian Thomson was born in London in 1961, but grew up in New York, where his father worked for a bank. His mother, a Baltic émigrée, came to England in 1947. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and in the 1980s he worked in Rome as a teacher, translator, journalist and writer. He contributes regularly to the national broadsheets and weekly magazines, among them the Observer, Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator. Currently, He supervises the MA Creative Writing Nonfiction Program at University of East Anglia.
His first important book, Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti (1992), considered a “great and abiding classic” by the film director Jonathan Demme, was listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Award. His biography of Primo Levi, Primo Levi: A Life (2002), took 10 years to write and won the Royal Society of Literature’s W.H.Heinemann Award. In 2005 Ian Thomson returned to the West Indies to write The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009). Banned in Jamaica for political reasons, the book was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book Award.
Emily Midorikawa
(Photo by Liz Godfrey)
Emily Midorikawa is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. She is the author of Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, and the coauthor of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontё, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf (written with Emma Claire Sweeney, and with a foreword by Margaret Atwood).
Emily is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. Her journalism has appeared in publications including the Paris Review, TIME, The Times (of London), and the Washington Post. She is an experienced writing tutor, having taught at institutions including the University of Cambridge; City, University of London; the Open University; and New York University London, where she was based until 2024.