The Ink Academy Team

JOE DUNTHORNE’s debut novel, Submarine, was adapted for film by Richard Ayoade. His second, Wild Abandon, won the 2012 Encore Award. His latest is The Adulterants. A collection of his poems, O Positive, will be published by Faber & Faber in 2019. He teaches prose fiction on the MFA at the University of East Anglia.

ABI DARÉ is the author of The Girl with the Louding Voice, which was a New York Times bestseller, #ReadWithJenna Today Show book club pick, BBC Radio 4 Bookclub Pick, and Indie Next Pick. Translated into 20 languages, The Girl With The Louding Voice has been shortlisted for several awards, including The British Book Awards Best Book of The Year and The Nigeria Prize for Literature. Abi lives in Essex, UK with her family.

CHRIS POWER is the author of Mothers, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His novel A Lonely Man will be published in April 2021. He writes regularly for the Guardian and New Statesman, and can sometimes be heard presenting Open Book on BBC Radio 4. He lives in London.

Ayisha Malik is author of critically acclaimed novels Sofia Khan is Not Obliged, The Other Half of Happiness, This Green and Pleasant Land and The Movement. She was a WHSmith Fresh Talent Pick and Sofia Khan was a London CityReads choice. She has written a re-telling of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Part – part of Hachette’s Awesomely Austen children’s series – and the children’s book Seven Sisters. Malik is winner of The Diversity Book Awards and has been shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Award, Marie Claire’s Future Shapers Awards, h100’s Awards for Publishing and Writing, and is recipient of the Society of Authors’ Travelling Scholarship.

FIONA LENSVELT is the New Projects Editor at the crowdfunding publisher Unbound, where she commissions non-fiction. She is also author of Wild Card, published by Pan Macmillan.

Previously, she worked in newspapers for a decade, most recently as a book critic and editor for The Times. She continues to write and review for various publications.

Okechukwu Nzelu is a Manchester-based writer. In 2015 he was the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North. His debut novel, The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney (Dialogue Books), won a Betty Trask Award; it was also shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Polari First Book Prize, and longlisted for the Portico Prize. In 2021, it was selected for the Kingston University Big Read. His second novel, Here Again Now (Dialogue Books, 2022) was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

PHILIP CONNOR is a commissioning editor at Unbound and former bookseller in Ireland, Australia and the UK. He studied creative writing under Mike McCormack and Kevin Barry at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is the winner of the inaugural UCL scholarship from Faber & Faber to study the MA in Publishing at UCL. He is a reviewer for publications including the TLS, has won the Cúirt Festival’s New Writing Prize and been longlisted for the Bath Novel Award.

Robert Collins is an author and journalist. His debut novel, Soul Corporation, was published in 2004. He was the Deputy Literary Editor of The Sunday Times and Senior Producer at Intelligence Squared, where he produced discussions with authors including Jonathan Franzen, Karl Ove Knausgård and many others. He has written for the Financial Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, Spectator, Literary Review and Observer, and was a judge for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. He is a regular fiction reviewer for The Sunday Times.

ANNA WILSON has published over 50 books for children and young teens. She has been shortlisted for the Hull Libraries Award, the Lancashire Book of the Year Award, the ALCS Educational Writers’ Award, the Teach Primary Book Awards and the Hampshire SLS Awards. Her latest series Vlad the World’s Worst Vampire has been translated into 13 languages. Anna’s memoir, A Place for Everything – my mother, autism and me, was Editor’s Choice in The Bookseller magazine and featured on BBC Woman’s Hour. Anna is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow for Exeter University at Penryn and a tutor for the Arvon Foundation, the HarperCollins Author Academy and the Writers’ Block in Cornwall.

SILVIA MOLTENI is Head of Children’s Books at Peters Fraser and Dunlop with a decade of experience in selling children’s and YA books, audio and translation rights. She graduated with honors from the University of Milan with a degree in Philosophy of Science and then went on to get an MA in Creative Writing and Publishing at Kingston University in London. The Bookseller named Silvia 2019’s Rising Star.

LISA THOMPSON is the author of several critically acclaimed children’s books. Her debut novel, The Goldfish Boy , has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. It has gone on to become a best-seller around the world. Lisa’s novella, Owen and the Soldier , was shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Awards.

The Times has called her ‘one of our most inventive writers for children.’

VASHTI HARDY is an award-winning author. Her debut Brightstorm was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and Books are My Bag Awards, among others, and her second, Wildspark, won the Blue Peter Book ‘Best Story’Award in 2020. Vashti is now the author of over ten books and her breath-taking children’s fantasies are published across the world in many languages. Previously a teacher, Vashti also has an MA in Creative Writing from Chichester University and loves teaching and engaging with the craft of storytelling.

SUSANNA HISLOP is a freelance writer and editor. She has taught Creative Writing at the Idler Academy, and has written for a number of publications, including: The FT Magazine, 1843 Magazine, The Idler Magazine, the Telegraph, the Times, the Sunday Times and the Evening Standard. Her book Stories in the Stars: An Atlas of Constellations (Penguin Random House) has been translated into six languages. She co-wrote the Connell Guide to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway with John Sutherland; and is an editor of the online literary magazine The Junket. She is also an actor and director who has written and performed in work for the stage and screen.

EDMUND GORDON taught the January 2018 Author Masterclass. He was born in 1982. Edmund is an essayist and reviewer, whose work has appeared in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, among others. His book The Invention of Angela Carter, published in 2016, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award, and was selected as a Book of the Year in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Spectator, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and New York Times. Since 2011 he has taught literature and creative writing at King’s College London.

LU SPINNEY taught the November 2017 Author Masterclass. She was born in Cape Town and grew up on a farm in Natal near the Drakensberg mountains. After university, she left South Africa to study in Nice and Paris, before settling in London. She is the author of Beyond the High Blue Air, a memoir published in 2016 by Atlantic in the UK and Catapult in the US. She is currently working on her second book, a work of fiction.

‘This book is a work of the highest literary skill and heroic courage’ – John Sutherland

NED BEAUMAN taught the September 2017 Author Masterclass. He was born in 1985 in London. His debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fiction Book and the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His latest novel, Madness Is Better Than Defeat, is to be published in August 2017. He has been chosen by the Culture Show as one of the twelve best new British novelists and by Granta as one of the 20 best British novelists under 40. His work has been translated into more than ten languages.