Josephine Bruni
Following an education in Classics, Josephine attended university in Genoa to study Creative Writing before spending four years touring as a jester in a company of actors and musicians specialising in medieval festivals.
She has written plays featuring giant puppets, including ‘Confetti’, which won the first prize in the National Festival of Puppeteers in Perugia, Italy. Her short story The Jungle won the cover competition of Open Pen (and is available here). Another, Reborn, was published by Litbreak, an American online magazine. Her story about Brexit was included in Normal Deviation, an anthology published by Lyle Skains of the University of Bangor (available here).
Josephine is a committee member for CSFG and is the treasurer for the group.
Wave Davis
Wave Davis is a writer and activist. He is a member of Writers Rebel and a founding member of Collier Street Fiction Group. He has a Masters in Creative Writing from City University. He is currently preparing his novel, Waking, for submission.
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)
Read an extract of Wave’s novel Waking here.
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, Rosetta in Colletta, 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.
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 pen 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.
Collier Street Fiction Group 