Hawthornden Castle Writers
2025
Elinam Agbo
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Elinam Agbo is a Ghanaian American writer, editor, and educator. She holds an AB from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she won two Hopwood Awards and co-founded the online zine MQR Mixtape. A graduate of the Clarion Workshop, she was the 2021-2023 Kenyon Review Fellow in Prose and guest editor of Black Estrangement, a special online issue of Kenyon Review featuring emerging Black writers. Her work has appeared in Transition, Apogee, American Short Fiction, Nimrod, the PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018, and elsewhere. Currently an Assistant Professor at Bucknell University, she is at work on a novel and a story collection.photograph by Anna Tagkalou Photography
Nawaaz Ahmed
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Nawaaz Ahmed is a transplant from Tamil Nadu, India. Before turning to writing, he was a computer scientist, researching search algorithms for Yahoo. He holds an MFA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the recipient of residencies from Macdowell, VCCA, Yaddo, Djerassi and Hawthornden. His debut novel Radiant Fugitives (2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Pen/Faulkner Award and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Aspen Literary Prize, and received the Gina Berriault award. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working on his second novel, exploring the who, what and why of our current technological moment.
Judith Baumel
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Judith Baumel’s books are The Weight of Numbers, for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; Now; The Kangaroo Girl; Passeggiate and Thorny. She is Professor Emerita of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as President of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, director of The Poetry Society of America and a Fulbright Scholar in Italy.
Sarah Chihaya
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Sarah Chihaya is a critic, essayist, and editor, and is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, and The Yale Review, among other places. She has taught at Princeton University and NYU, and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Queens, New York.
Alix Christie
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Alix Christie is an American-Canadian journalist and author of the historical novels Gutenberg’s Apprentice (Harper Books, 2014) and The Shining Mountains (University of New Mexico Press, 2023). Her prize-winning stories include “Everychild,” winner of the 2021 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in fiction from The Missouri Review and a Pushcart Prize, and “The Dacha,” a finalist for the Sunday Times (UK) Short Story Award. A California native and letterpress printer, she currently lives in Berlin, where she reviews books for The Economist and other publications and swims in any available lake or sea.
Majella Cullinane
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Majella Cullinane writes poetry, fiction, and essays. Originally from Ireland, she has lived in New Zealand since 2008. Her second collection Whisper of a Crow’s Wing, Otago University Press and Salmon Poetry, Ireland, and her most recent, Meantime, Otago University Press, were chosen as The Listener’s Top Poetry Books in 2018 and 2024. Grants and writing awards include: a Copyright Licensing New Zealand Grant, a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant, and an Irish Arts Council Grant, an Auckland Museum Research Grant, The Hennessy/XO Irish Times Literary Award for Emerging Poetry, The Sean Dunne Young Writers’ Award, and The Caselberg International Poetry Prize. She was Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 2014. Her debut novel, The Life of De’Ath was shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Fiction Prize, and longlisted for the 2019 New Zealand Book Awards. Her writing has been published internationally, and she has held residencies in Ireland, Scotland, and New Zealand. In 2020, she graduated with a PhD in Creative Practice from the University of Otago. She lives in Port Chalmers with her family.
Alix Christie
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Adriana Díaz Enciso is a Mexican poet, author of fiction and translator. She lives in London. Her latest novel, Ciudad doliente de Dios (Doleful City of God, Alfaguara), was inspired by William Blake’s prophetic poems. She wrote lyrics for the Mexican rock band Santa Sabina, has written for the stage and TV, and has been a contributor to over 30 literary journals in Mexico, the UK and other countries. She’s been a trustee for Modern Poetry in Translation. Her fifth novel (written in English and in Spanish simultaneously) was written as a beneficiary of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. She was co-curator, along with artist Pato Bosich, of the exhibition “Beyond the Shadow of the Ship” for Three Highgate Gallery in London (December 2022-February 2023), around Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Her translation of a selection of poems by British poet David Harsent will be published in 2026 by Spanish publisher El Toro Celeste.
Tim Earley
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Tim Earley is the author of five collections of poems, including Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (Horse Less Press, 2014), winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and Epigrams Both Ludic and Regicidal (Delete Press, 2019). An e-chapbook,Rattle Rib, was published by Garden Door Press in 2025. He is also the creator/lead writer of the tabletop roleplaying game, Holler: An Appalachian Apocalypse. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina and teaches online courses in creative writing, Appalachian literature, British literature, and fantasy literature for the University of Mississippi.
Yalitza Ferreras
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Yalitza Ferreras was the 2022-2023 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing in Madison, WI. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a recent Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories, Kenyon Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Aster(ix), The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Tin House Summer Workshop, Djerassi, Yaddo, Ucross and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, and Voices of Our Nation. She teaches writing at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Beth Filson
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Beth Filson holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in poetry but loves working across multiple genres including playwriting, visual arts, and prose. Her one-woman show, Telling the Story/ Untelling the Diagnosis, was produced by Pauline Productions in the US; a portion of her play in progress, The Moon Over Us, had a staged reading at the Lava Center, also in the US. Beth’s poetry has appeared in a number of journals; her awards include the Wild Light Poetry Prize sponsored by Red Hen Press and the Los Angeles Review. Her art has been chosen for the covers of The Florida Review and other journals. Beth is recognized for her work in Trauma-Informed Approaches and the reduction of seclusion and restraint in psychiatric settings in the US and the UK. She makes her home in New England in the magical city of Easthampton in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.
Marianne Gordon
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Marianne Gordon is a dark fantasy writer who has published two books, 'The Raven's Trade' series, with HarperVoyager, and her work is due to appear in BFS Horizons. When not reading or writing, Marianne is a copyeditor and proofreader, and spends her time exploring the Scottish countryside on her motorbike. She is currently working on a fantasy detective series with Del Rey US.
Josina Guess
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Josina Guess is a writer, poet and editor. Her work is in the anthologies Bigger than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic (Lookout Books 2022) and Light for the Way Seeking Simplicity, Connection, and Repair in a Broken World (Broadleaf 2026) as well as Oxford American, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Bitter Southerner, and more. From 2022 to 2025 she was part of the interdisciplinary Vulture Sister Song tour, melding ecology, poetry, art, community engagement, and dance. She is an associate editor for Sojourners and lives in rural Georgia with her family and several animals.
Alicia Foster
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Alicia Foster is a novelist, art historian and curator. Her novel Warpaint was published with Penguin in 2013. She has solo-curated exhibitions of the work of Jessica Dismorr and Gwen John, and associate-curated, Tate Gallery's Now You See Us: Women Artists 1500-1920 in 2024. Her most recent book, Gwen John, Art and Life in London and Paris, was published with Thames & Hudson in 2023, shortlisted for the Berger prize, and a Times book of the year. Her next book, The Real Bohemians, will be published with Virago in 2027.
Photo credit: John Foster
Vishwas Gaitonde
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Vishwas Gaitonde spent his formative years in India, has lived in England, and now resides in the United States. His prize-winning short story collection On Earth As It Is In Heaven has been published by Orison Books. Literary magazines where his writing has been published include The Iowa Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Epiphany, and Santa Monica Review. Besides Hawthornden, he has been awarded two writing residencies at The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (Minnesota, USA). He was a finalist for The Chautauqua Institution’s Janus Prize “for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imaginations.”
Praveen Herat
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Born in London to Sri Lankan parents and educated in the UK, where he graduated from Oxford and completed UEA’s Creative Writing M.A.. Praveen Herat currently resides in Paris. But it was a three-year period, living in Phnom Penh, that marked him profoundly as a writer. This would be the prelude to the research and writing that became Between This World and the Next, winner of the 2022 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. A literary thriller that charts the evolution of transnational crime after the fall of the Soviet Union, Between This World and the Next criss-crosses the globe, from Cambodia to Ukraine, Dubai, and Liberia.
Neal Hovelmeier
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Neal Hovelmeier was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1978 andis the author of three novels: Unfeeling, (2005), shortlisted for the 2006 Dylan Thomas Prize, Of Beasts and Beings (2010) and What Happened to Us (2018). His short fiction has appeared in the Cambridge Literary Review and received Honourable Mention by the judges of the Manchester Prize. He was a finalist for the Rolex Mentor-Protégé Initiative in 2014 and in 2009, 2015 & 2025 a Fellow of the Hawthornden Writers’ Residency. In 2019 he was appointed the Robert G. James Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He holds a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand, where he has also been an Associate Research Fellow. He writes under the pseudonym of Ian Holding.
Craig Higginson
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Craig Higginson is a playwright and novelist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has won numerous national and international literary awards, including the Sony Gold Award, an Edinburgh Fringe First, the UJ Main Award for Literature (twice), the HSS Award for Fiction and Naledi Awards for Best New Play. His plays have been performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre in London, the Trafalgar Studios on London’s West End, the Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival and several other theatres around the world. His fiction has been published internationally in England and the United States and translated into French, Arabic and Turkish. Craig has a PhD in Creative Writing, and his novel The Dream House was the IEB Matric set work in South Africa from 2019-2021. His most recent novel, The Ghost of Sam Webster, which recently won the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Fiction, will be published in the United States under the title
Shadow Country in 2026. Craig was a recent recipient of the Hawthornden Residency in Scotland.
Sunwoo Jeong
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Sunwoo Jeong is a Korean writer living in NYC and Seoul in alternation. A Kundiman Fellow and a Clarion alum, she has a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Split Lip, Lightspeed, and Uncanny magazine, among others, and has been included in The Wigleaf Top 50 Long List. She is currently working on a collection of linked short stories and a novel. You can find her at @translunarytree.
Lucy Jones
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Lucy Jones is a British writer and literary translator from the German who lives in Berlin. She has translated the work of Anke Stelling, Silke Scheuermann and Ronald M. Schernikau, among others, and was runner-up in the 2023 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Die Geschwister (Siblings) by Brigitte Reimann. Her own short creative non-fiction has appeared in SAND, Pigeon Pages NYC, LitroMag and others. She is currently writing her first book.
Photo credit: Oliver Toth
Mel Kassel
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Mel Kassel is a writer from Chicago. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a World Fantasy Award Winner, she's had short fiction published in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She spent her time at Hawthornden Castle searching for slugs and working on a novel.
Helen Klein Ross
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Helen Klein Ross is the author of three novels: The Latecomers (Little, Brown, 2018), What Was Mine (Simon & Schuster, 2016) and Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue (Simon & Schuster, 2013). She is editor and creator of The Traveler's Vade Mecum (Red Hen Press, 2016), an anthology of new poems titled by 1853 telegrams, solicited from poets including Frank Bidart, Billy Collins, and Emily Fragos. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and in The Iowa Review where she won the 2014 Iowa Review award in poetry. She holds a BA from Cornell and an MFA from The New School. Helen lives in Manhattan and Salisbury, CT.
Photo credit: John Gruen
Chin-Sun Lee
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (Unnamed Press 2023), listed among Publishers Weekly’s Big Indie Books of Fall 2023 and Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2023. She’s one of Poets & Writers’ 5 Over 50 Debut Authors of 2023 and is also a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014). Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Joyland, and The Believer, among other publications. She writes, edits, and teaches in New Orleans. More at www.chinsunlee.com.
Margaret Lloyd
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Margaret Lloyd was born in Liverpool, England, of Welsh parents and emigrated to a Welsh immigrant community in central New York State. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, England, under the tutelage of Geoffrey Hill. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press published William Carlos Williams’s Paterson: A Critical Reappraisal. She is the author of five poetry books, most recently Sleeping in the Same World (Kelsay Books, 2024). Her poetry honors include a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, fellowships to Breadloaf and to Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and a writing residency at Yaddo. Lloyd has also published widely in literary journals such as Poetry East, Willow Springs, New England Review, AGNI, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Stand, and Poetry Wales. Lloyd is Professor Emeritus at Springfield College, Massachusetts. Find more about Lloyd at her website: www.margaretlloyd.net
Maggie Millner
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, a New York Times Editors' Choice, one of The Atlantic's ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Research Scholar at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.
Photo credit: Sarah Wagner Miller
Ange Mlinko
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Ange Mlinko is the author of seven books of poetry: Foxglovewise (2025), Venice (2022); Distant Mandate (2017); Marvelous Things Overheard (2013), which was selected by both the New Yorker and the Boston Globe as a best book of 2013; Shoulder Season (2010), a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award; Starred Wire (2005), which was a National Poetry Series winner in 2004 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Matinees (1999). A book of lyric criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, was published in 2024 in Oxford University Press.
Mlinko is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poetry Foundation’s Frederick Brock prize and the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism. She served as poetry editor for The Nation from 2013-16, and her criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. She teaches poetry and directs the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and is poetry editor for the journal Subtropics.
Samantha Neugebauer
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Samantha Neugebauer is a lecturer at NYU D.C., a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly, and regular contributor to the podcast Slush Pile. Her writing has been nominated for inclusion in Best American Short Stories and has appeared in Ploughshares, The Hopkins Review, The Offing, Vassar Review, and elsewhere. She is also co-host of the new short story review channel, Short Story Boudoir. Previously, Samantha spent years working abroad at NYU’s campuses in Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, London, Berlin, Florence, and Athens. Originally from Philadelphia, she holds degrees from Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, and NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study; she is a first-generation college graduate. At Hawthornden, she finished a novel, and her short story collection, Villains, is forthcoming in January 2027. Read some of her work at: https://samanthaneugebauer.com/.
Jørgen Norheim
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Jørgen Norheim (b. 1952) is a Norwegian author who lives in Berlin. Since his debut in 1994, he has published five novels, all of which deal with themes from modern European history, and one non-fiction book (travel essays, 2019). His last novel, Aldri redd for mørkets makt (2016), thematizes the left-wing political movement in Norway in the 1920s and 1970s, in the shadow of Stalin. His sixth novel will be published in the fall of 2025, which is a counterfactual historical novel. The novel Adjutanten (2008) has been translated into German. In 2002, he was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize for the novel Ingen er så trygg i fare, and in 2008 for the Norwegian Brage Prize for the novel Adjutanten. Norheim is a historian from the University of Oslo, with theology and philosophy as additional subjects. He was from 1987 to 1996 the subeditor of the journal Syn og Segn by the publishing house Det Norske Samlaget, Oslo. He has financed his writing through various grants and a part-time job as a metro driver in Oslo.
Photograph by (C) Sara Sanderud
Pascal O'Loughlin
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Pascal O'Loughlin is a librarian and the co-ordinator of the Liverpool Irish Festival. His novels are Now Legwarmers (2018) and The Goddess Lens (2020). He lives on the Wirral peninsula in North West England.
Deborah Paredez
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Deborah Paredez is the author of four books: the critical memoir American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous (Norton, 2024), the scholarly study Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke, 2009), and the poetry collections This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Writers' League of Texas Poetry Book Award and a New York Times New and Notable Book. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization dedicated to Latinx poets and poetry. She lives in New York City where she is an Associate Professor and Chair of the creative writing program at Columbia University.
Photo credit: Sammy Tunis
Dolores Payás
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Dolores Payás is a writer and translator. She was born in Spain (1955) but from early on has made her home in many different countries. She has lived in Mexico City, Paris, Barcelona, Beijing and the Peloponnese. For decades she worked in film and television, mainly as a scriptwriter, but in 2012 she left the world of filming to concentrate on writing. It was long in the making, but one of the most important decisions of her life. She claims never to have regretted it for a single second. As a writer, she has published four novels, a travelogue and a literary essay. Those she has translated include Patrick Leigh Fermor, Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham. Her last novel–Ultimate Love, Círculo de Tiza, 2023–was shortlisted for the Premio Azorín. Her most recent translation was an edited selection of Dickens journalism: Pasiones públicas, emociones privadas. Escritos periodísticos, Charles Dickens. Editorial Gatopardo 2024.
Irrepressible and adventurous, Payas has a sharp sense of humour and an idiosyncratic literary style, combining facets of the screenwriter, traveller, passionate reader and translator. Her writing is fluent, intelligent, biting and sensual, that of one who juggles words and literary genres. She defines herself as “babélica” (polyglot) and “apátrida” (stateless), and currently lives between Greece, Switzerland and Spain.
Photo credit: Giota Koutelou
Dana Sachs
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Dana Sachs has published five books, most recently All Else Failed: The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis (Bellevue Literary Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature. Her previous books are the novels If You Lived Here and The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (both from William Morrow, 2006 and 2013) and two works of nonfiction, The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam (Algonquin, 2000) and The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam (Beacon, 2010). Her writing has appeared in many publications, including National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and Mother Jones. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Hawthornden Foundation, and Weymouth Center for the Arts. She co-founded the nonprofit Humanity Now, which supports grassroots aid projects for refugees and migrants.
Meara Sharma
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Meara Sharma is a writer and artist. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in The Believer, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Artforum, Ambit, Vogue, the Washington Square Review, Apartamento, and elsewhere. She has produced radio programmes and podcasts for NPR, BBC Radio 4, Audible, and Spotify, and has received residencies and fellowships from Villa Lena, Cove Park, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the University of Southern California. A longtime editor for Guernica and the founding editor-in-chief of Adi, she is currently senior editor of Elastic, a new magazine of psychedelic art and literature. With roots in Massachusetts and South India, she currently lives between London and Glasgow.
Photo credit: Alice Zoo
Catriona Shine
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Catriona Shine is an Irish-Norwegian writer and architect. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Habitat, published by the Lilliput Press in March 2024, was a Sunday Times, Irish Times and The Journal Most Anticipated Book of 2024 and longlisted for the McKitterick Prize. It received positive reviews in The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, The Irish Examiner, RTÉ and elsewhere. She was an awardee of the Evolution Programme at the Irish Writers Centre 2024/2025 and a guest at the opening of the Cork World Book Festival 2025. She represented Dublin UNESCO City of Literature at the Nanjing International Writers' Residency in November 2022. She has received a Literature Bursary Award and two Agility Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her writing has been published in The Dublin Review, Southword, Aesthetica, Hemingway Shorts, Channel, Nanjing Daily, Frogpond and elsewhere.
Caroline Smith
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Caroline Smith trained as a sculptor at Goldsmiths. She lives in Wembley and works with refugees. The Immigration Handbook (Seren) was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and translated into Italian by Prof Paola Splendore (edizioni dell’asino). Smith is widely published in journals and anthologies and has won and been placed in many poetry prizes. Her new book, Bycatch’will be published in October 2025 by Nine Arches Press. In conjunction with Brent Libraries, Smith has started Poetry in Wembley 160+One. This series of readings brings contemporary poets to diaspora communities. It celebrates the 160 languages spoken in Brent plus the unifying language of poetry.
Fiona Templeton
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Fiona Templeton writers poetry that is mostly for performance —she writes plays that are poetry. She thinks about time, about attention, about space, and about women, in practical ways. She stages work on citywide scales, and in intimate reach. She is urgently concerned with the relations between humans.
Fiona is also Artistic Director of The Relationship, a New York-based company staging works mostly by poets and by women, and with radical approaches to design for relationship to the audience. For 10 years, she was director of the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. Previously, she co-founded the Theatre of Mistakes in London in the 1970s. She has published 12 books of poetry and performance, and has produced performance work on both intimate and citywide scales on several continents. Honors include Fellowships from the NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Asian Cultural Council and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard.
Meara SharmaNadya Todorova
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
Nadya is a screenwriter & director with a love for stories that highlight the small human facing world-changing events. She graduated from Screenwriting at FAMU International and participated in several film labs, among which Sarajevo Talents and the EastWest Talent Lab. She graduated from the TV writing program Serial Eyes in 2020. She was chosen as a writer’s apprentice at Frank Spotnitz’ Big Light Productions in 2021. Nadya was a staff writer on the TV show Franklin for the Spanish company Grupo Black Panther, and on “Alpha”, a TV show for bTV Bulgaria which premiered in February 2024. Her documentary debut feature I'm not a bad man is coming to cinemas in January 2026, she recently won the BBC International Playwriting Georgi Markov Award, and was a finalist at the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival One Act Play Competition.
Pia Volk
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2025
I am a writer based in Germany. Mostly, I write about the ambiguous space between what is and what may, might, or could be. Although I like lists - like this one: fascination, drive, discipline, some talent (maybe), zeitgeist, someone you know who knows someone, the right time, the wrong place, re-try, the right time, the right place, someone else who knows someone, some magic (better a lot), edit, edit more, publication - reading a list of accolades is tiresome to me. It replaces the awe for the writing with an awe for names. Hardly any plot, storyline, envy being the only possible hook. Not a very catching one, though. Every text (or artwork for that matter) is unique, either my writing moves you or it doesn’t. Repulsion is fine; love, too. Although they often go together.