Josephine Bruni
After studying Classics, Josephine worked as a jester in Italy, writing imitation medieval poems and songs for a group of actors and musicians. Later, she became an actress-puppeteer, writing scripts for award-winning shows. When she was forced into exile from Italy for her political convictions during the Berlusconi years, she reached London with her two children who are now well settled. She spends much of her time writing about Camden where she lives and helps out in her local community, caring for people with serious addictions. Though she spends a lot of time in churches she is still an anarchist.
Her novel Saint Joan’s Sword won the 2024 HW Fisher Prize with Curtis Brown Creative and a Free Reads with The Literary Consultancy. Now it just needs to be completed!
Maud Waret
Born in Paris and brought up in rural France, Maud went to study eighteenth-century literature and Modern European history at the Sorbonne. Fascinated by linguistics and languages, she then travelled to South America and India before settling down in the UK where she recorded two EPs as a singer-songwriter. Full-time mother of two children and a full-time French and Spanish teacher in a secondary state school, she mostly writes fantasy world-building fiction in her spare time. Her latest interest is how to decolonise the curriculum and issues of race and identity.
Bruno Noble
Bruno read philosophy and French literature at Southampton University before finding employment in London in advertisement sales, bond sales and asset management where, amongst other things, he wrote financial market reports.
His first novel, A Thing of the Moment, was crowd-funded and published by Unbound in 2018. It’s a novel about the nature of self and identity told from the perspectives of three women, as explained here. Bruno’s second novel, The Colletta Cassettes, sets a teenage love story alongside the confessions of a retired CIA agent in Italy in 1978 at the time of the Argentina World Cup. It was published by Indie Novella in 2022.
Bruno can testify to the truth universally acknowledged that a writing man in possession of a good novel must be in want of a literary agent and he waits to hear from one.
Read an extract of Bruno’s novel A Thing of the Moment here.
Alex Norris
Alex has been passionate about words and writing since childhood, when he’d write his own stories, normally heavily plagiarised from whatever he was reading at the time. Still with a keen interest in story-telling – now minus the plagiarism – when he’s not at work, Alex continues to spend his time writing. Currently working on a novel set in contemporary London (something he’s sure has never been done before), Alex enjoys narratives told from LGBTQ+ perspectives and other under-represented voices. Aside from writing, Alex enjoys pop music, horror films and being by the sea.
Jonathan Dancer
Jonathan is a strategy consultant and facilitator specialising in the life sciences. His passion for knowledge and an insatiable curiosity has led him to the study and exploration of everything from the stars to the mountains to the undersea world. Fluent in several languages, he has travelled widely in Europe and beyond. His books are an alchemy of the concrete, scientific and fantastical, with envisioned worlds, rules of nature and characters that are both strangely alien and disturbingly familiar.
He hopes to publish his first book, A Denser Air, shortly. He is currently working on the final book of the trilogy.
Matthew Diamond
A Londoner by birth and inclination, Matthew has lived in deepest Hertfordshire since 2006 with his wife, son and two cocker spaniels. For a large part of the 1980s and 90s he was a performer and in-house songwriter with the comedy circuit’s then premier a capella group The Draylon Underground. Along with regular appearances on TV and radio, Matthew wrote comedy material for BBC Radios 4 and 2.
For the first two decades of this century he worked as an IT consultant, travelling the world and developing a hatred of both airports and en-suite bathrooms. Matthew began writing fiction in earnest in 2018 and in 2019 completed his first novel, an East End family saga about resisting the return of fascism immediately following the Second World War. He is currently working on his second novel, set in the 1990s London comedy circuit.
Sandeep Sandhu
Sandeep is a writer from London. He graduated with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh, and has had fiction and poetry appear in places like ‘Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’, ‘The Dodge’, ‘Rejection Letters’, as well as other publications. His love of books began when his mum used to leave him at the local library for the day during the summer holidays, and he’s been a voracious reader and writer since. Although he generally focuses on literary fiction, he loves a great genre story, and has a keen interest in Latin American, Indian, and Japanese literature. He is currently working on his first novel, ‘The Cinnamon Trail’, which explores the lingering trauma of colonialism and partition through the lens of an Indian family in the mid-to-late 20th Century.
Isabelle Gill
Isabelle cannot remember when she started writing, other than she always had a pen and paper and some sort of tome wherever she went, even at the dinner table, and that was apparently quite unusual for toddlers.
A passion for writing developed into a degree in English Literature from Sussex University, and a career in social media for TV, eventually segueing into marketing for food brands – eating being her second great love.
Isabelle has written two novels, and is working on edits to self publish both. She won a short story competition judged by Deborah Moggarch which was published in a University anthology, and has attended writing courses at Central Saint Martins and the Groucho Club. She also has a foodie Instagram @izzyeatseverything. Give her a follow if you like pictures of food.
Alaster Douglas
Alaster’s writing debut won him a year’s subscription to a mountain trekking magazine. Featured on the letters page his missive has so far been the pinnacle of his commercial publishing career. After teaching English in four secondary schools, he returned to university to complete a doctorate on how student teachers are supported in the workplace whilst in training. Subsequently, he changed education sectors and became a university lecturer.
He has published extensively as an academic researcher and is now trying a new literary genre. He hopes his attempts at writing fiction will enable him to combine his interests beyond the academy. He particularly enjoys travel and the London arts scene. He still treks the odd mountain but is yet to pen a sequel to his earlier commercial success.
Anna Harvey
Anna works for a record label in London and is a published songwriter and photographer. She has had two short stories published in The Open Pen Anthology. She is currently on the second draft of a thriller, her fifth novel since she began writing fiction seriously in 2018, but the first in a commercial genre. All her novels have a speculative element and have had modest success in competitions including runner-up in the 2022 Grindstone International Novel Prize, two novels simultaneously long listed for the Stockholm Writers Festival First Five Pages award, top 100 of the Cheshire Novel Prize and runner up in the 2023 Comedy Women in Fiction Festive Flash Fiction competition. She has a following of over 5000 on TikTok for her poetry and literary content (@annaharveywriter).
Wave Davis
Wave Davis is a writer and activist. He is a founding member of Collier Street Fiction Group and has a Masters in Creative Writing from City University. He is also the founder of Organising from Elsewhere, a radical project which takes a complex systems approach to ‘learning’ from indigenous narratives through embodied forms of ‘listening’.
He is currently preparing his novel, Waking, for submission and working on a memoir.
Praise for Wave Davis: ”…enormously impressed by [his] skill, natural talent, courage, and commitment… a tremendously talented writer…Very few writers have achieved anything in the order of the achievement we see here…in no doubt that Waking will find the audience it rightfully deserves.” Mira Hyland, Author (Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Booker Prize, and winner of the Encore Prize and the Hawthornden Prize)
Collier Street Fiction Group 