At the Pond

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian. Her first book, Turning: A Swimming Memoir, was published by Virago in 2017 and named among the best books of the year by both Canadian newspaper the National Post and German newspaper Die Zeit. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and completed her dissertation on the history of Hampstead Heath. She was Writerin-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018 and has written for BBC Radio 4, TLS and MUNCHIES, among others. Her second book, Two Trees Make a Forest: A story of memory, migration, and Taiwan, will be published in 2019 by Virago. Jessica lives in Berlin.



Amy Key’s second poetry collection, Isn’t Forever, a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice, was published by Bloodaxe in June 2018 and was named a book of the year in the Guardian, The Times and the Irish Times. Her poems have been widely published in magazines including Granta, The White Review, Poetry, The Poetry Review, Poetry London and Broadly, and in anthologies f rom Faber & Faber, Penguin and Ignota Books. She is currently writing a hybrid work of creative non-fiction and poetry.



So Mayer is a writer, bookseller, and activist. Their recent projects are collaborative essay Tender Questions (with Preti Taneja, Peninsula Press, 2019), the TinyLetter Disturbing Words, and poetry chapbook (Litmus Publishing, 2019), as well as the introduction for Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (eds. Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás, Ignota Books, 2019). Previous work includes Political Animals: New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015) and (O) (Arc, 2015), and a decade of writing on film culture for Sight & Sound, The F-Word and Literal Magazine. So works at Burley Fisher Books and with queer feminist film curators, Club des Femmes, and is a co-founder of Raising Films.



Sophie Mackintosh was born in South Wales in 1988, and is currently based in London. Her fiction, essays and poetry have been published by Granta, The White Review, the New York Times and The Stinging Fly, among others. Her short story ‘Grace’ was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize, and her story ‘The Running Ones’ won the Virago/Stylist Short Story competition in 2016. Sophie’s debut novel The Water Cure was published in 2018 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her second novel Blue Ticket will be published in 2020.



Ava Wong Davies is a freelance theatre critic and playwright based in London. She won the Harold Hobson Sunday Times Award for theatre criticism in 2018. She writes regularly for Exeunt Magazine and The Stage, and has written arts criticism for The Line of Best Fit, Fest Magazine, Girls on Tops and the Independent, as well as on avawongdavies.wordpress.com. She is currently part of the Soho Theatre Writers Lab 2018-19.



Nina Mingya Powles was born in New Zealand and partly grew up in China. She is the author of several poetry pamphlet collections, most recently field notes on a downpour (2018) and Luminescent (2017). Her poems and essays have been widely published in New Zealand, the US and the UK, including in Poetry, Daikon, Hainamana Arts and The Willowherb Review. In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize. She is poetry editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and founding editor of Bitter Melon, a new poetry pamphlet press. Her prose debut, a food memoir, will be published by The Emma Press in 2019.



Deborah Moggach was born in 1948. She is the author of eighteen novels including the bestselling Tulip Fever. In 2012, her novel These Foolish Things was adapted for the screen under the title The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. An award-winning screenwriter, she won a Writers’ Guild Award for her adaptation of Anne Fine’s Goggle-Eyes and her screenplay for the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was nominated for a BAFTA. Deborah was appointed an OBE in the 2018 New Year’s Honours List for services to literature and drama. She lives in Wales with her husband, Mark.



Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore and lives in London. She is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award. Her debut novel, Ponti, was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Award and the Edward Stanford Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place and selected by Ali Smith as one of the best debut works of fiction published in 2018.



Leanne Shapton is an artist, illustrator and writer who was born in Toronto and lives in New York. She is the author of several books, including Swimming Studies, The Native Trees of Canada, Women in Clothes (with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits), Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris and Guestbook: Ghost Stories. She is the co-founder of J&L Books, a non-profit imprint specializing in photography.



Esther Freud was born in London in 1963. As a young child she travelled through Morocco with her mother and sister, returning to England aged six where she attended a Rudolf Steiner school in Sussex. In 1979 she moved to London to study Drama, going on to work as an actress, mostly in the theatre. Her first novel, Hideous Kinky, was published in 1992 and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and made into a film. In 1993, after the publication of her second novel, Peerless Flats, she was named by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists under 40. She has since written seven novels, including The Sea House, Love Falls, Lucky Break and most recently Mr Mac & Me. Her first play, Stitchers, played to sold out houses at Jermyn St Theatre in June 2018. She also writes stories, articles and travel pieces for newspapers and magazines, and teaches creative writing, in her own local group and at the Faber Academy. She lives between London and Suffolk.



Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of nineteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone,The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady, The Pure Gold Baby and, most recently,The Dark Flood Rises.She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980 and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.



Eli Goldstone is a writer born in Manchester and based in Margate. Her first novel, Strange Heart Beating, was published by Granta in 2017 and in 2018 won a Betty Trask Award. She is an alumna of the Creative Writing (Novels) MA at City University, London and the previous prose editor of Cadaverine.



Nell Frizzell is a freelance writer and casual lifeguard. She has written for, among others, the Guardian, VICE, the Telegraph, Elle, Grazia, the Observer and is a Vogue columnist. She spent two happy summers standing on the deck of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond as a lifeguard. Nell has also featured several times on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Short Cuts and as a guest on Radio 5 Live, BBC London and (surprisingly often) on BBC Radio Ulster. As well as journalism, Nell has written and performed comedy, is a seamstress and knitter, and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to teach her baby to love the outdoors as much as she does.