4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE are a poetry collective and sisterhood made up of Roshni Goyate, Sharan Hunjan, Sheena Patel and Sunnah Khan.

The collective was born on the waters of the Thames in 2017 where Sheena gathered friends on a boat to share in creativity and vulnerability. The four found resonance in each other’s voices and formed a WhatsApp group that became a safe place to share and receive each other’s writing.

Their first collection of poetry was published in 2018 by FEM Press and recommended by Forward Prize shortlisted poet Shivanee Ramlochan. They went on to open for T.S. Eliot prize winner Roger Robinson at the 2019 Stoke Newington Literary Festival and took a 5 star sell-out show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that same year where they also showcased other Black and Brown artists—upholding their principle of creating circles not pyramids in dismantling the exclusionary nature of artistic space.

They are a harbour and a sisterhood—each other’s biggest fans and fairest critics.

This is their first collective offering of solo works.

ADELLE STRIPE was born in 1976 and grew up in Tadcaster. Her debut novel, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, is based on the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar. It received the Society of Authors’ K Blundell Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Adelle is a founding member of the Brutalist Poets and has published three poetry collections. Her journalism has appeared in The Quietus, Caught by the River, and New Statesman. In a previous life she worked as a chatline hostess, window dresser, and was the manager of Selfish Cunt. Her recent publications include Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers, and an essay in the forthcoming Excavate: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall.

Alex Zawadzki is a curator who explores the unseen, the forgotten and the undercurrents of everyday life. One part of duo Uncultured Creatives and Director of The Second Act Gallery, she has written for Saatchi Art and Music Magazine and The Museum of Youth Culture.

AMANDA DE FRUMERIE is an artist and an illustrator living in Stockholm. Her practise moves between imaginary landscapes in the forms of board games, maps and detailed ceramic sculptures. In recent years she has collaborated with the Swedish publishing company BCNVT, drawing and writing for books about music, as well as collaborations with bands such as Death and Vanilla. Her work often involves ideas of specific places, memory and childhood, always with miniscule details and tactile surfaces, inspired by fairy tales, medieval miniatures and Japanese woodcuts.

ANA DA SILVA is a founding member and songwriter of the pioneering post-punk band The Raincoats. Across four daring full-length records, The Raincoats helped shape the timeless notion that punk is what you make it to be—an act of raw expression, not any one sound. The Raincoats have offered creative and spiritual inspiration for several generations of artists, cited as a formative influence by Kurt Cobain, Carrie Brownstein, Bikini Kill, and Sex Pistols’ John Lydon. They set a crucial precedent for feminist work within a DIY punk context, marked all the while by Ana’s poetic lyrical style and innovative noise guitar playing.

After The Raincoats’ hiatus in 1984, Ana collaborated with The Go-Betweens on their single Bachelor Kisses and she formed the band Roseland together with This Heat’s Charles Hayward. She wrote music and collaborated with choreographer/dancer Gaby Agis on Shouting Out Loud and Undine and the Still performed at Sadlers Wells, Riverside Studios, ICA and Almeida Theatre, London, and she wrote the music for Channel 4 film Freefall in 1988.

Ana returned to songwriting and performing with The Raincoats after Kurt Cobain invited them to tour with Nirvana shortly before his untimely death in 1994, and they released an album Looking in the Shadows in 1995 on DGC and Rough Trade.

In 2005, Ana released her solo debut, The Lighthouse—a self-recorded collection of spare, elegant experiments in electronic indie-pop on Chicks on Speed’s label. And in 2017 she collaborated with Japanese electronic performer Phew on the album, Island released September 2018.

ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY is the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017). His translations include works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Abdellatif Laâbi, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Alessandro Spina. His writing has appeared in Playboy, The Nation and World Literature Today. He is the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2019). The Other Side of Nowhere is his first pamphlet.

Anna Wood is a writer and raver. Her first book of short stories, Yes Yes More More (The Indigo Press), is out now.

BABAK GANJEI is a musician (Absentee, Wet Paint), artist and a writer of comics (Hilarious Consequences, Early Learnings). He also has a radio show with his son on NTS. After a four year struggle, he finally sold a set of twigs from his neighbourhood on eBay for £82 and managed to get a pep talk about his role as an artist from Thames Water and British Gas.

Balraj Singh (Bobby) an interested participant of interesting things since 1975.

BRIONY BAX is a poet and editor. She’s edited Ambit Magazine since 2013 and her poems have appeared in Ambit, Meat, Herrings Anthology and New River Press Anthology. She is the poetry editor for The New European.

As a social advocate she’s the Founder of The Orphan Support League in the USA and has volunteered at the Saidia Children’s Home in Gilgil, Kenya for the last 12 years. She sits on the Board of Trustees for Theatre Ad Infinitum, Saidia Children’s Charity, The Wells Maltings Trust and serves as a local councilor in Brancaster Staithe, Norfolk.

Cathy Thomas' short fiction has appeared in publications including The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine and Banshee. Her first story collection, Islanders, was published by Virago in June 2022.

CATMOUSE is an artist based in London. You may see Catmouse’s work on walls in your neighbourhood, as well as on various platforms, such as music records, people’s skin, prints, paintings on canvas and found materials. Catmouse is into drawing birds, cats, raccoons, badgers, people, oil barrels, bombs, skulls, masks and many other things that may get your attention. 

CHARLOTTE NEWMAN was born in Surrey in 1986. She was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge and Birkbeck, University of London. She won the inaugural Sabotage Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet in 2013 and was featured in The Salt Book of Younger Poets in 2011. She was highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2017 and was featured in the Forward Book of Poetry 2018.

Her literary criticism has appeared in The Observer, The New Statesman, Poetry Review, Poetry London and The Dark Horse, among others; she was shortlisted for The Scotsman’s Allen Wright Award for theatre criticism. Charlotte works in public affairs and PR. She is the author of Selected Poems (Annexe, 2012) and Trammel (Penned in the Margins, 2016).

CHILLY GONZALES is known as much for the intimate piano touch of his best-selling Solo Piano album trilogy as for his sweaty showmanship and composition for award-winning stars. He fills the world’s great philharmonic halls dressed in his slippers and a bathrobe—in any one night he can be found giving a sublime solo recital, dissecting the musicology of a Billie Eilish hit and displaying his lyrical dexterity as a rapper. He performs and writes songs with Jarvis Cocker, Feist and Drake and won a Grammy for his collaboration on Daft Punk’s Best Album of the Year. A culmination of recent years’ explorations in teaching, Chilly Gonzales recently inaugurated his very own music school: The Gonzervatory.

CHRISTOPHER SHANNON is a multidisciplinary designer, printmaker and artist. Christopher
works at the intersection of image production, content creation and clothing construction that provoke questions and look at the ways masculinity, culture and class are entangled and confused in the contemporary age. Northern culture is a constant source of inspiration, yet never from a place of nostalgia.

CLAIRE RATINON is an organic food grower and writer based in East Sussex. Claire has grown edible plants in a variety of roles from growing organic vegetables for the Ottolenghi restaurant, Rovi to delivering growing workshops throughoutLondon to audiences including primary schools, community centres and corporate clients. She has been invited to share her growing journey and experiences in talks and workshops for organisations including The Garden Museum, the RoyalCollege of Art and West Dean College as well as having presented features forRadio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time. Her writing has been featured in The New Statesman, Bloom Magazine and The Modern House Journal and her first book, How To Grow Your Dinner Without Leaving The House (Laurence King) is out now.

COLD WAR STEVE aka Christopher Spencer is an artist from Birmingham who specialises in surreal, satirical and hilarious collages made on his phone and iPad. Since 2016 Cold War Steve’s Twitter account with almost daily posts has been a lifeline to many in these dark times with his following increasing by the day. Three solo exhibitions, a book entitled The Festival of Brexit (Thames & Hudson) artwork commissions for The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, a giant billboard installation at Glastonbury Festival and an international TIME magazine cover have all followed in the last year.

CRAIG OLDHAM has been named as one of the most influential designers working in the UK, and has written books on a range of topics, including education, culture, and politics. He is the concept and series editor of Epiphany Editions, the first of which, They Live: A Visual and Cultural Awakening was published in January 2019. He is also Rough Trade Books Creative Director and obviously an all-round good guy!

DANIEL BLUMBERG (b.1990) is an artist, composer and musician from London. His drawings have accompanied his musical output in the form of record covers and small edition books and in 2016 he was awarded a scholarship to study at London’s prestigious Royal Drawing School.

Blumberg has spent much of the last five years working solely within the radical community of artists centred around London’s Café OTO. His duo with Seymour Wright, GUO, has seen recent collaborations with David Toop and the American filmmaker Brady Corbet. In recent years, Blumberg has collaborated live and in the studio with Lambchop, Neil Michael Hagerty and Low.

DAVID BRAMWELL is a singer-songwriter in Oddfellow’s Casino, author of The No9 Bus to Utopia and The Haunted Moustache and a Sony award-winning broadcaster. For BBC R3 and BBC R4 he has made programmes on subjects ranging from Ivor Cutler and Ken Campbell to time travel.

The Cult of Water began life as an experiment radio programme for BBC R3’s Between the Ears, and as a live multimedia show, mixing archive footage, spoken word, music and ritual. It will be available as a live album combining music, narrative and the mighty voice of Alan Moore.

DAVID KEENAN grew up in Airdrie in the late 1970s. A senior critic for The Wire, he is also the author of two books: England’s Hidden Reverse (Strange Attractor) and This Is Memorial Device(Faber & Faber), his debut novel which was a Telegraph and Rough Trade Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2017.

DAVID SHILLINGLAW is an artist whose practice shifts from drawings and paintings to large-scale murals and installation. David has also worked as an illustrator and designer for a range of clients. Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2002 he has exhibited in galleries internationally and has also engaged in a number of community projects and artist residencies.

DON LETTS is firmly established in the film and music world from the late ‘70s through to the millennium. In 1977 he turned a generation of punks onto reggae as DJ at The Roxy—the UK’s first punk club. That led to his first film The Punk Rock Movie with Sex Pistols, The Clash and others. He went on to direct over 300 music videos for artists ranging from Public Image Limited to Bob Marley. In the ‘80s he formed Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones (ex-Clash). Don’s documentaries include films on Gil Scott-Heron, Sun Ra and George Clinton. In 1997 he scored a hit in Jamaica with his first feature film Dancehall Queen and in 2003 he won a Grammy for his Clash documentary Westway To The World. Along with Culture Clash Radio—his weekly show on BBC 6 Music—Don still DJs internationally and continues making films. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary doctorate for his contribution to British culture.

Dorothy is a Liverpool based design studio that produces prints, products and artworks that are sold and exhibited internationally. The studio is best known for their Blueprint collection of prints, including the Acid House Love Blueprint which intricately maps out the history of dance music and rave culture on the circuit diagram of a 303 bass synthesizer.

ELLA FREARS is a poet and artist based in London. Her collection Shine, Darling (2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Goodlord: An Email (2024) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection as well as the Sky Arts Awards.

She has held residencies and fellowships for
the Tate Gallery, the National Trust, Royal Holloway University physics department, John Hansard Gallery, the Dartington Trust, 16 motorway service stations, the number 17 bus in Southampton,
and Exeter University’s environmental history department.

She is currently the RLF Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She hosts "Tears for Frears" on Soho Radio.

EMMA WARREN has been documenting music and culture for decades. Her first book Make Some Space: Tuning into Total Refreshment Centre came out in spring 2019.

EVA VERMANDEL is a Belgian photographer who lives and works in London. Her practice investigates the impact of the intense technological change we’ve experienced in the last couple of decades on society and individuals. Vermandel’s first monograph Splinter (2013, Hatje Cantz) received accolades internationally and her work is in the collections of the V&A, London; the National Portrait Gallery, London; and the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Fergal Kinney writes on music, culture and society for publications including the Guardian, the Quietus, the Face, Tribune, Loud & Quiet and more. He was born in 1993 five miles north of Blackburn, in Langho, and currently lives in Manchester.

FERNANDO SDRIGOTTI was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1977. His fiction and critical writing has appeared widely online and in print, and has been translated into French, Italian, Turkish, Norwegian, Arabic, Bosnian and Spanish. He is the author of several books, including Shitstorm (Open Pen, 2018), Grey Tropic (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019) and Jolts (Influx Press, 2020). He lives in London.

Gabrielle de la Puente is a writer from and based in Liverpool. She co-runs The White Pube with Zarina Muhammad, where she publishes criticism on all the culture that gets on her nerves (for better or worse).

HASEEB IQBAL is a 22 year-old writer, broadcaster and DJ from north London. He has a monthly residency on Worldwide FM, as well as hosting his own independent podcast platform, Mare Street Records.

This project aims to open up questions rather than conclude upon such ideas objectively. I hope this can start a conversation rather than limit one. Feel free to get back to me with any thoughts and responses you may have.

JAMES ENDEACOTT was born and raised in Halifax on St Patrick’s Day in 1965. He wanted to be a comedian but he couldn’t make people laugh so he ended up working in various different roles in the music industry from A&R for Rough Trade Records to managing bands including Tindersticks. Playing guitar in the band Loop to setting up his own label 1965 Records. He has an obsession with David Bowie and often goes under the name the Fat White Duke. He’s been telling people for over 30 years that he’s not Mick Hucknall. His hair is the colour of Viking Gold and he prides himself in showing no weakness in his lust for life. James also presents Morning Glory, a radio show on Soho Radio.

Jamie Holman is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is informed by the heritage of working-class communities, in particular the impact of the industrial revolution and the cultures that have manifested as a consequence of its emergence and subsequent decline. Holman is one half of Uncultured Creatives—a creative studio practice in partnership with curator Alex Zawadzki. Their work seeks to interrogate “who we have been, are now and may yet become.” Holman has exhibited extensively in the U.K. and internationally and is currently artist in residence for the British Textile Biennial.

JARVIS COCKER formed the much-loved Pulp aged 15 and has subsequently made solo records, hosted his own hugely popular radio show, and had a selection of his lyrics published by Faber & Faber in his book Mother, Brother, Lover. His first book, This Book is a Song, will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2019.

Acme Attractions, Public Image Limited, Rough Trade Records & Management. Still standing...

Jeff Young is the author of Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize and longlisted for the Portico. He’s an essayist, scriptwriter for radio and stage and used to write for TV. He collaborates with musicians and artists on installations, sound art, spoken word and performance projects in places such as a submarine dock, shipyard warehouse, derelict townhouse, cobbler’s shop and boating lakes and he’s a collagist and assemblage maker. The sequel to Ghost Town is out in 2024 and after that he’s going to attempt/fail to write Lucid Dreamer, the definitive hallucinatory history of Liverpool’s counter-culture.

JEN CALLEJA is the author of Vehicle: a verse novel (Prototype), named a Book of the Year in Granta and The Big Issue; the long poem Dust Sucker (Makina Books); and the forthcoming hybrid translator memoir Fair (Prototype).
She was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize 2020 and longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experiment in Text 2020, and her writing has been published in The White Review, The London Magazine, Ambit, Wasafiri, Best British Short Stories (Salt), The Shining: A Visual and Cultural Haunting (Rough Trade Books),
and elsewhere. She has been shortlisted for many translation prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize 2019 for her translation from German of Marion Poschmann's The Pine Islands. She is co-publisher at Praspar Press, which supports Maltese literature in English and English translation. She is from Shoreham-by-Sea and is now based in Hastings.

JENN PELLY is a contributing editor at Pitchfork and author of The Raincoats, a volume in the 33 1/3 series on the feminist punk band. Priests is a musical group based in Washington, DC. The band’s first full-length album, Nothing Feels Natural, was released in 2017 on its own label, Sister Polygon Records.

JESS WHITE was born in Sussex, with her childhood split between there and Brussels. After studying illustration at Falmouth College of Arts she moved to London. She has spent over a decade working as a studio assistant for two prominent artists, firstly Damien Hirst and currently Raqib Shaw whilst continuing her own illustrative practice.

Whilst living in the city, she focused on studying the internal structure of plants in her drawings, showing in several exhibitions. A move out of the city last year prompted her to explore the surrounding nature as a whole, and she continues in her attempts to capture the beauty of the natural world in her illustrations.

JOE DUNTHORNE’S first novel, Submarine, was translated into sixteen languages and adapted for film by Richard Ayoade. His second, Wild Abandon, won the 2012 Encore Award. His latest novel is The Adulterants.

JOHN GRANT is without question one of the most celebrated singer-songwriters of the past decade. His debut solo LP Queen Of Denmark was voted MOJO magazine’s Best Album of 2010 and his profile has continued to rise ever since through a series of rapturously received releases that combine acutely melodic chamber-pop with darkly glittering dance music centred on synth-pop and disco. Against this brooding and inventive backdrop and channelled through his glorious dulcet baritone, Grant unleashed autobiographical laments and diatribes, as beautiful and intimate as they were caustic and savagely funny. 2013’s Pale Green Ghosts helped earn him Attitude Magazine’s Man of the Year award and, in what is perhaps his biggest accolade so far, an International Male Solo Artist nomination at the 2014 BRIT Awards. His most recent album, Boy From Michigan was released in Summer 2021 via Bella Union.

JON SAVAGE is the author of England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945 and 1966: The Year that the Decade Exploded. His films (as writer/ consultant) include The Brian Epstein Story, Joy Division, Teenage and 1966: It Was Fifty Years Ago. He is currently working on An Oral History of Joy Division and the fourth in a series of compilations on Ace Records: 1965, 1966, 1967 and now 1968.

Sports Banger started in 2013 with no laptop, no money, just a hand-me-down smartphone and a local internet cafe.

JONNY BANGER was born in Colchester and lives in London.

Sports Banger studio-cum-shop can be found on the magical Seven Sisters Road, London. For any more info google ‘Sports Banger’—the interview on Wavey Garms website explains all.

It’s art, it’s fashion, it’s music, it’s whatever u want. Everyone is invited.

KATINKA VAN GORKUM was raised in Barendrecht, a suburb of Rotterdam where people remove the leaves from their gardens with a vacuum cleaner. As an artist and writer, she investigates the interior world of humans through the private domain. Her life and practice are intimately intertwined, her living space becoming a site of experiment, for example when she moved the bedroom door of her Brussels’ apartment to a museum and lived without her door for several months.

KIRK LAKE was born in Leamington Spa. He has written numerous books and films. On screen appearances include the archivist in the Nick Cave film 20,000 Days on Earth, the journalist in The Dali and the Cooper and Stoker in the forthcoming film-noir The World We Knew. In the 1990s, he released a series of pioneering spoken-word recordings including the boxing themed album The Black Lights.

KIRSTY GUNN published her first novel with Faber in 1994 and since then has written five works of fiction and three short story collections. Her books have been translated in over a dozen territories, been widely anthologised, been broadcast, turned into film and dance theatre, and have also won multiple prizes and awards including the Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories, the Scottish Book of the Year, as well as a shortlisting for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. A regular contributor to a range of international newspapers and magazines, she is also Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, where she established and directs the writing programme. She lives in London and Scotland with her husband and two daughters.

LATE OF THE PIER were a band of inter-dimensional rhythm jammers, sent to the late naughts from the quiet North West Leicestershire countryside. Their music was a mutant take on pop that described the chaos of being a teenager by looking forwards and backwards, over and over again, until the present moment started to make sense. They released their cult debut album Fantasy Black Channel to great acclaim in 2008 and subsequent singles Blueberry and Best In The Class in 2010. They comprise of Sam Eastgate, Sam Potter, Andrew Faley and Ross Dawson who inspired the making of this machine.

LAURA LEWIS is an award-winning photographer specialising in portraiture and documentary. She has been taking photographs since she can remember. Born in Scotland, raised in Norfolk and educated in Norwich, London and Lisbon, Laura’s photography commissions and projects have taken her all over the world. She enjoys the beauty of what naturally ‘is’; people’s expressions or movements, their natural habitats, the items that they surround themselves with, and naturally occurring visual patterns in landscapes, objects, nature and urban sprawl.

LESLIE WINER showed an appetite for music, literature and art from a young age, those interests drawing her into a circle of intellectuals, artists and radicals including the likes of William S. Burroughs and Jean-Michel Basquiat while living in New York. Re-locating to London, she released her seminal debut album Witch, anticipating much that would become central to the period’s musical landscape. Winer continues to write and record and pursue a myriad of other artistic avenues, resulting in the kind of boundless output that only an artist of truly singular vision can achieve.

LILY BLACKSELL is a poet living in London. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Review, BOMB Magazine, Bath Magg, Magma, The Scores and elsewhere. She runs a poetry and music night called Canon Fodder. Her pamphlet There's No Such Thing was published by ignitionpress in 2018.

LINDER is a British artist known for her photography, photomontage and confrontational performance art. Previously the frontwoman of Manchester post-punk band Ludus, she was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in 2017, and has had solo exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, Kestnergesellschaft, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and MoMA PS1. In 2025,Linder will have a retrospective exhibition at a major London institute.

LISA CRADDUCK was born in Wembley in 1980. A Fine Art graduate from Sheffield Hallam University and Chelsea School of Art, Cradduck is a founder member and director of Mutton Fist Press, an autonomous, co-operative printmaking studio and exhibition space in Archway, London. She has previously exhibited work at The Horse Hospital, Communist Gallery, Five Years, and at the Ghetto Biennale, Haiti. Cradduck is currently studying experimental binding techniques for use in the production of limited edition, hand-printed and bound artist books. She runs a popular, specialist linocut course and is a tutor on the advance printmaking programme at City Literary Institute, London.

LOLA LELY is a multidisciplinary artist whose recent work encompasses furniture design, textiles, sculpture and teaching. Born in Vietnam and raised in London, her first creative incarnation was as a tattoo artist in Mexico. Having later graduated from the Royal College of Art, where she studied Design Products, Lely has worked on a wide range of solo and collaborative projects, many involving public spaces and social themes. Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Design Museum and Art Basel. She was ‘Artist in Residence’ at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London during 2018.

LORENA LOHR was born in 1990 in London. She has worked across parts of Europe, North America, and North Africa.

Though she does not limit herself to any particular subject, Lohr’s wider body of work is characterised by recurring motifs: electrical wiring, colourful drinks and details of the bodywork of automobiles are just some of the hallmarks that stretch across her series and artist’s books. Language, as glimpsed in commercial signage, is another leitmotif of her photographs: generic phrases that evoke an exoticism at odds with their surroundings feature heavily, both contributing the visual richness of her compositions and hinting at hope, longing and isolation.

Working with 35mm colour film and a variety of compact and inexpensive cameras, Lohr stays true to the DIY spirit that characterises much of what she chooses to photograph. Lohr’s work does not expressly seek to romanticise or glamourise, yet celebrates the idiosyncratic traces of people’s involvement on a given area, documenting the incidental layers of narrative that build up over time in the places she visits.

She is now conducting a detailed study of the endangered downtown hispanic neighbourhoods of El Paso, Texas.

LUKE TURNER is a writer and editor based in London. In January 2019 he published his first book, Out Of The Woods, a critically-acclaimed memoir exploring sexuality, identity, religion and shame in the context of the woodland of Epping Forest. He is also a co-curator of the Epping Forest strand of Waltham Forest’s 2019 year as London’s Borough of Culture. In 2008 he co-founded influential website The Quietus, which has grown to reach a global audience of half a million readers each month with informed, longform journalism on music, arts and popular culture within the context of contemporary society. In 2017, Turner curated a series of live events as part of Hull City Of Culture 2017’s commemoration of the radical art collective COUM. He has contributed to The Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Vice, the BBC, NME, Q, Mojo, Monocle, Nowness and the SomeSuch journal, among other publications in the UK and beyond.

LUKE WRIGHT is the author of two collections of poetry, two verse plays, and ten spoken word shows. He is the winner of a Fringe First Award for new writing, a Stage Award for acting, and a Saboteur Award for spoken word. For over a decade he has co-programmed the biggest spoken word line-ups in Britain, at Latitude and Port Eliot festivals, bringing together hundreds of poets for an annual summertime party. He lives in Suffolk with his two sons.

Since rising to prominence in the late 1990s, MARCEL DZAMA has developed an immediately recognisable visual language that investigates human action and motivation, as well as the blurred relationship between the real and the subconscious. Drawing equally from folk vernacular as from art-historical and contemporary influences, Dzama’s work visualizes a universe of childhood fantasies and otherworldly fairy tales.

MARCEL THEROUX is the award-winning author of six novels.

He was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1968. He grew up in England, studied English Literature at Cambridge University and International Relations at Yale, where he specialized in Soviet and East European Studies. In addition to his books, Theroux has written a number of original screenplays and written and presented more than a dozen documentaries on subjects ranging from climate change to the Japanese aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi. He is a regular presenter of Unreported World on Channel 4.

MARTHA SPRACKLAND was born in 1988. She is editor at Offord Road Books, associate editor at Poetry London, and a founding editor of multilingual arts zine La Errante. She was previously assistant poetry editor at Faber & Faber, and before that was co-founder of Cake poetry magazine. Her own poetry has appeared widely; she is a poet-in-residence for Caught by the River, and writes a column for Five Dials. A debut pamphlet, Glass As Broken Glass, was published by Rack Press in 2017, and a first full collection is forthcoming.

MATHEW CLAYTON suggests reading this pamphlet under the influence of:

Music – Sweet Thunder by Yello

Drink – Ovomaltine

Food – Le Gruyère

Film – Echoes of Home

He is the also the author of two books Lundy, Rockall, Dogger and Fair Isle: a celebration of the islands round Britain (Ebury) and The Nation’s Favourite (Quercus). He has contributed essays to the nature writing anthologies Caught by the River (Cassell Illustrated) and On Nature: Unexpected ramblings about the British countryside (Collins).

Mathew works as the Head of Publishing at Unbound and runs a literary tent at the Glastonbury Festival—the Free University. Previously he worked as the literature programmer for the Brighton Festival, as a co-director of the Port Eliot Festival and for Channel 4, The Guardian and Random House.

MAX PORTER is a writer. He lives in Bath, England, with his wife and sons. He loves to cook.

MAX SYDNEY SMITH was born in 1986 in London. His short stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines including The Stockholm Review, Structo, Open Pen, Shooter and Noon.

MELISSA LEE-HOUGHTON was born in 1982 and has published three collections of poetry with Penned in the Margins. The most recent collection, Sunshine (2016) was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, The Costa Book Award and the Forward Prize, and won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2017. In 2015, The Faithful Look Away won her a Northern Writers’ Award, and she has broadcast two of her short stories on BBC Radio Four. She is a Next Generation Poet.

MICHAL NOVOSAD is a trained electrician and sometime DJ, originally from Slovakia, who has been living in London for the last eight years and been homeless, mainly in the Walthamstow area, for the last five years.

MUSA OKWONGA is a writer, broadcaster and musician. The co-host of the Stadio football podcast, he has published one collection of poetry and three books about football, the first of which, A Cultured Left Foot, was nominated for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. His work has appeared in various outlets, including Africa Is A Country, Byline Times, Foreign Policy, Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist and The Ringer. He lives in Berlin.

NAT MADY is a Hackney-based permaculturist with a passion for connecting people with nature. In 2015, she founded Hackney Herbal, a social enterprise promoting wellbeing using herbs asa way to share knowledge about plants and their many creative uses. As a self-taught gardener she is happiest with her hands in the soil, playing with plants, talking to birds or chatting to others about the wonders of the natural world.

NINA CHAKRABARTI grew up in Kolkata, India and moved to the UK in her teens. A love of drawing led her to study illustration at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art. After graduating art school she continued to develop her distinctive line quality and built up an eclectic clientele. In 2009, she wrote and illustrated her first book, My Wonderful World of Fashion, published by Laurence King, which became a bestseller and was translated into ten languages. She’s written several other books for children including Hello Nature, which won an AOI World Illustration Award in 2017. She currently lives and works in London.

OLLY TODD is from Whitehaven in Cumbria and now lives in London after stints in Liverpool, Worcester and LA. His poems have appeared in The Rialto, Vice, Five Dials, Belleville Park Pages, Test Centre and the Clinic anthologies. He skates for Palace Skateboards and works as a travel copywriter.

PATRICK JONES lives small, thinks skies.

Work includes: Everything Must Go / Unprotected Sex / The War is Dead /Before I Leave / The Guerilla Tapestry / Commemoration and Amnesia / Fuse / Darkness is Where the Stars Are/ Tongues for a Stammering Time /Renegade Psalms

PETE FOWLER is an artist, designer, DJ and musician. He is one-half of the band Seahawks and has created album covers for Super Furry Animals and artwork for bands including The Horrors and Tim Burgess. His illustrations adorn book covers, T-shirts, skateboards, comics and prints. He has spent several years creating monsters.

RACHEL LOUISE HODGSON is an artist living and working in London. Rachel hopes to amuse and disturb you. @rachellou_h

REN ALDRIDGE is a vocalist, artist and writer. She is the front woman of feminist post-hardcore band Petrol Girls whose latest album Cut & Stitch comes out May 2019 on Hassle Records. She is a regular writer for Ladyfuzz zine and her essay Touch Me Again And I Will Fucking Kill You: Cultural Resistance to Gendered Violence in the Punk Rock Community was published in 404Ink’s award-winning anthology Nasty Women. Her art practice deals with language, bodies and overthrowing capitalism.

RICHARD KING is the author of How Soon Is Now? (Sunday Times Music Book of the Year, 2012) Original Rockers (shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, 2015), and the forthcoming The Lark Ascending (2019). He lives in Radnorshire, rural Mid-Wales.

RICHARD PHOENIX is an artist living and working in London who uses painting, drawing, writing, interaction and music to learn about how people can be together. He has worked with learning disability arts organisations and individual artists and musicians since 2006 as a facilitator, collaborator and project co-ordinator. He is currently Artist-in-Residence in the Tate’s Schools and Teachers Department and Associate Artist for organisation Heart n Soul. His involvement within the UK’s D.I.Y. music scene includes being in the bands Sauna Youth, Monotony, Child’s Pose, The Steal and Captain Everything!, among others—and his own artistic practice informs his interest in how accessibility and inclusion can improve things for all.

He founded Constant Flux in 2013 to support bands with learning disabilities to tour the UK and play integrated gigs. He has worked for organisations such as Heart n Soul, Carousel, Club Soda, Culture Shift and Stay Up Late supporting people with learning disabilities to form bands, create music, record and perform; as well as organising countless other gigs, releases, events and projects.

ROBERT BARRY is a writer and composer based in London. His music has appeared in feature films, dance productions, pop charts, and DJ mixes. He is currently editor for books, film, and visual art at The Quietus and a faculty member at London’s Institute for Contemporary Music Performance. As a freelance writer, his byline has appeared in Frieze, The Guardian, Wired, Art Review, Mousse, The Atlantic, and The Wire. Previous publications include a book of prose scores, Music in Text, and a history of speculative music, The Music of the Future.

ROBERT RUBBISH studied at the Royal College of Art in London and is noted as one of the founders of the hugely influential Le Gun magazine. He has produced largely autobiographical works across a range of different media such as film, posters, typography, drawings and paintings and rose to prominence as part of the semi-fictitious artist duo ‘The Rubbishmen’ who inhabited the salubrious drinking dens and sleazy underworld of London’s Soho. His new works, inspired by Paris, continue to explore his fascination with bohemian intellectualism using humour and wit.

ROSE BLAKE was born in London in 1987. She studied at Kingston University and the Royal College of Art, and now works as a freelance illustrator in London. Although she has illustrated many books, this is her first time writing one.

ROWAN SPRAY is a botanical photographer and fine artist who lives and works in east London. Colour and form are integral to her practise—the spaces in-between become as important as the subject itself, whilst an electrified palette, applied to natural form, asks the viewer to look again with fresh eyes.

PJ SMITH was born in North Liverpool. Just another one of the kids growing up on Newby Street. He followed a path, lost his footing and fell. His long fall was broken with the help of a net: creativity. Writing, just getting it all out of your head and onto the page. ROY was born. The fella least likely to, first walked onto a stage four years ago and took the mic. He immediately grabbed and held attentions and effortlessly led them through the streets of his imagination introducing the weird and wonderful characters of his, and your conscious, subconscious and unconscious past.

RUSSELL WEEKES was born in Hertford, grew up in Nottingham, and currently lives in South London. Through the use of observations and misreadings, his work attempts to focus attention on easily overlooked aspects of everyday life.

SALENA GODDEN is one of Britain’s foremost spoken word artists and poets whose electrifying live performances and BBC radio broadcasts have earned her a devoted following. She is the author of the collections, Under The Pier, Fishing in the Aftermath: Poems 1994-2014, and the literary memoir Springfield Road. Her live spoken word album LIVEwire was released with indie spoken word label Nymphs and Thugs and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry 2017.

SAM AYRE is an artist, educator and musician based in East Sussex. Sam specialises in socially-engaged projects that focuses on opinions, society, pedagogy and ideas of legitimacy surrounding art, culture and history. Much of his work is project based, engaging groups of people in exploring their opinions, ideas and emotions. He has run participatory projects for Whitechapel Gallery, TateModern, Turner Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Art Night London amongst others. He makes paintings, drawings and performances in his studio practice which compliment and supports all aspects of the participatory projects. He isa massive fan of flawed perspectives, conviviality and tangents.

SÁRA IVÁNYI was born in Budapest when there was still an iron curtain, and moved to Amsterdam at a young age. This experience has led her to question the notion of boundaries in every sense, and drew her to the idea of language being an alien or parasitic life form. As a poet and artist she is interested in many things. Her poetry has been featured on Hotel, and her book of antilipos HER/HIM was published by Dark Editions (2022). She is also a member of an art-science collective that keeps changing its name, and examines collective thinking through algorithmic performance and spreadsheets.

SHARAN HUNJAN is a poet and teacher from London. She is part of the literary collective 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE, whose first collaborative book was published by FEM Press, and has had work published in the poetry anthology Slam! You’re Gonna Wanna Hear This (Pan MacMillan 2020). She published her pamphlet, ‘Hatch’, as part of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE publication with Rough Trade Books in 2020. With this collective, she has performed at Stoke Newington Literary Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, British Library and Tate and appeared in British Vogue.

Open Mouths is her debut full-length collection.

SHEENA PATEL is a writer and assistant director for the film and TV industry. She is part of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE collective and her debut novel I'm a Fan won the Discover Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2023, has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and finalist in the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Category for the L.A. Times Book Prize. It was Foyles Fiction Book of the Year 2022 and an Observer Best Debut Novel of 2022.

SOPHIE DUTTON is an independent art director, curator and founder of Works by Madge Gill. Madge Gill by Myrninerest is her first book and accompanies a landmark exhibition of newly uncovered large-scale embroideries, textiles and archival objects, many of which have never been exhibited before by the visionary artist Madge Gill. On display at William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London throughout Summer 2019.

SOPHY HOLLINGTON is an illustrator and artist living in Brighton. Not being one to cut corners, most of Sophy’s commercial work takes the form of relief prints, created using the lengthy process of lino-cutting. Her personal work tackles themes from meteoric folklore to mannerism; and she’s interested in wrangling the most out-there ideas to make them totally tangible. She’s worked for such clients as The New Yorker, The New York Times, WeTransfer and The Poetry Review.

STEPHANIE VON REISWITZ is an artist and illustrator with a penchant for the mysterious and the darkly funny. Educated in Brussels and London, she graduated from Central St Martin’s. Her work includes pictures, comics, murals, animation, and installations. As a core member of London art collective LE GUN, as well as independently, she has widely exhibited in the UK, Europe, the US, Japan, and China. She lives and works in London.

SUSANNA GRANT is a writer, gardener and sound artist. She is co-founder of Linda—an outdoor shade-loving plant specialist and garden-design business in east London. Susanna is also a volunteer gardener at the Boundary gardens in Arnold Circus.

THE FANDANGOE KID is a London-based print artist who makes large-scale narrative driven pieces for the public realm. Her work seeks to smash taboos around complex subject matters such as loss, trauma release, mental health and gender constructs. The artist has created work for a wide range of purposes, most recently with her ‘Staircase of Dreams’ for London Design Festival 2020, working with young people to develop a collective narrative on daily activism.

In 2019, she installed an 80 metre narrative on the entire floor of City Hall for Sadiq Khan’s charity Thrive Ldn, about the power of dancing for mental health. The installation was called ‘The Language is Movement’ and she presented it to Sadiq himself, having worked with young Londoners for months prior to the install to talk to them about what dancing means to them.

She has worked with young people in Hackney and inner-city London for over a decade, her remit being to encourage young people from all backgrounds to know themselves better through their creative practice.

THE WHITE PUBE is the collaborative identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad under which they publish reviews and essays about art, video games and food. You can find them at thewhitepube.com or on twitter and instagram at @thewhitepube.

THOMAS MORRIS is a Welsh writer, living in Ireland. His debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing (Faber and Faber), won the 2016 Wales Books of the Year, the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award, and a Somerset Maugham Prize.

Tim MacGabhann is an Irish novelist who divides his time between Mexico City and the UK, where he is doing a PhD. His first two novels, Call Him Mine and How to Be Nowhere, were published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2019 and 2020. Other fiction, non-fiction and poetry also appears in The Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review, The Tangerine, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, and Ambit.

WENDY ERSKINE works in Belfast. Her short story collection Sweet Home was published by The Stinging Fly Press in 2018 and Picador in 2019. It was shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Edge Hill Prize, and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Her writing has appeared in anthologies by Doire, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Faber & Faber, New Island, No Alibis, Repeater, The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, and in various journals. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and RTE Radio 1.

After dumping a career in graphics, WILFRID WOOD plunged into prop making at cult classic British TV show, Spitting Image. Here he learnt his trade as an ‘apprentice headbuilder’, starting in the ‘Eyeballs and Blinks’ department then moving on to ‘Dogs and Sheep’. Twenty-five years later he is now a portrait artist. His subjects are celebrities, invented characters, friends and strangers. He studies characters in the supermarket, in the news and on the bus. Wilfrid Wood is commissioned to make both 3D and 2D portraits, regularly drawing people in his Hackney studio.

WILL ASHON is the author of two recent works of non-fiction, Strange Labyrinth, about Epping Forest, and Chamber Music: About the Wu-Tang (In 36 Pieces), which focuses on the first album by New York rap group the Wu-Tang Clan (both published by Granta Books). He previously founded and ran the record label, Big Dada (Roots Manuva, Wiley, Kate Tempest), while at the same time, writing two novels, published by Faber & Faber. Chamber Music has been described as “charged and thrilling” (The Guardian) and “clever, provocative, ambitious” (Big Issue).

WILL BURNS was born in London and lives in Buckinghamshire. He is Poet-In-Residence at Caught By The River and was named as one of the four Faber & Faber New Poets for 2014 with his debut pamphlet in that series published in October 2014.

His second pamphlet was published as part of the Clutag Press 5 Poems series in early 2016, and in 2019, alongside the composer Hannah Peel he released Chalk Hill Blue, a collaborative album of electronic compositions and poems.

WILL HODGKINSON is the author of Guitar Man, Song Man, The Ballad of Britain and The House Is Full Of Yogis. He has written for Mojo, Vogue, the Guardian and Monocle, and as chief rock and pop critic of The Times he enjoys far more time in dives like the Windmill than is fitting for a man of his age. The first gig he went to, aged thirteen, was the Stingrays at the long- gone Clarendon in Hammersmith and his favourite album is Forever Changes by Love.

ZAKIYA MCKENZIE was born in South London, raised in Kingston,Jamaica and now lives in the southwest of England. In 2019 she was Writer in Residence for Forestry England and, at Ujima 98FM in Bristol, she was a Black and Green Ambassador in 2017. Zakiya is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter with the Caribbean Literary Heritage project researching Black British journalism in the post-war period.