Based in London, Eleanor Dickens has worked as Curator of Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives at the British Library since 2016, working closely with writers, publishers and creative practitioners across the UK’s literary landscape. With a background in comparative literature and linguistics, they are interested in contemporary poetry, counter-culture movements and the interplay between language, culture and narrative forms.
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf, FRSL, PhD, is the author of three poetry collections and editor of seven literary anthologies. Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and her début, An Aviary of Small Birds was an Observer Book of the Year. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, where she wrote her latest collection, Unsafe (Bloomsbury, 2026): a poetic meditation on the sacred, the city and our access to nature. In 2025 she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the RSL Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England). She has performed her work everywhere from The Royal Festival Hall, Kings Place and Barbican, to venues across Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Her poems are translated into Croatian, Dutch, Italian, Macedonian, Spanish and Turkish; have been exhibited by Poems on the Underground; produced as animation and dance; and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament in a poetry 'bombing' by the Chilean collective Casagrande.
Tristram Fane Saunders is a poet and journalist born in London and raised in Yorkshire. A prolific freelance critic for newspapers, magazines and radio, he is the author of five pamphlets of poetry and one full collection, Before We Go Any Further, shortlisted for the 2024 Seamus Heaney Prize. He is the editor of Edna St Vincent Millay: Poems & Satires, and runs The Little Review (thelittlereview.co.uk), a pocket-sized magazine about poetry. He has performed his poetry at Latitude Festival, the Southbank Centre and the Edinburgh Fringe. He is a Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Michael Symmons Roberts’ 4th book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for best collection, and the Griffin International Prize. His 6th collection, Drysalter, was the winner of the 2013 Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. His Selected Poems was published in 2016. He has also written extensively in prose and for broadcast, working for many years for the BBC, in radio, documentary filmmaking and as a producer. His forthcoming non-fiction book, Quartet for the End of Time, (Cape, April 2025) is about poetry, music and grief. In 2014, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and he is a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. He is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Naush Sabah is a writer, editor, and educator based in the West Midlands. In 2019, she co-founded Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal where she is currently Editor and Publishing Director. Her writing has appeared in The Poetry Review, the TLS, PN Review, The Dark Horse, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. Her debut pamphlet Litanies was published by Guillemot Press in November 2021 and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award in 2022. Naush is currently Poet-in-Residence at the Birmingham & Midland Institute. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University.
Callum McKean is a curator at the British Library working with literary archives and manuscripts from the post-war period to the present day. Since June 2021, he has led on the Library’s acquisition and research into the personal digital archives of writers, poets and other prominent individuals in contemporary public life. He received his BA in English Literature from University College London and his MPhil from the University of Cambridge, where his work considered the role of technology in contemporary auto-fiction. He has been the editor for the Library’s English & Drama Blog since 2017.
Manuela Pellegrino is a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University. She holds a PhD in anthropology from University College of London. Through her current project on ethnographic poetry, she conceptualises and uses writing poetry in Griko, a minority language of Greek origins. Since 2006 she has conducted research among Griko-speakers and activists in Apulia (Southern Italy) and Greece. She was a fellow of the Smithsonian Institution (2018/2019) and lectured part-time at Brunel University (2014-2017). She originally comes from Zollino, a Griko-speaking village.
André Naffis-Sahely is the author of the collection The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017) and the pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He is also the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He is from Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother. He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction from French and Italian. He is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School and is the editor of Poetry London.