Northern Bookshelf Live

Featured authors:

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  Brian Groom

  Brian Groom is a journalist and a leading expert on British regional and national affairs. His career was spent mainly at the Financial Times, where he was assistant editor. His first book, Northerners, was a Waterstones History Book of the Year and his second, Made in Manchester, was a Financial Times Book of the Year. 

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  Marcia Hutchinson

  Marcia Hutchinson was born to Windrush generation Jamaican parents in the UK in 1962. She was the first pupil from her comprehensive school to go to Oxford, where she gained an MA in Law. She worked as a lawyer before founding the educational publishing company Primary Colours, which she ran until 2014. 

  She was awarded an MBE in 2011 for services to Cultural Diversity. Moving to Manchester in 2012, she became a community activist and was eventually elected as a Labour Councillor in 2021. She is now a full-time writer. The Mercy Step is her debut novel. 

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  Sheena Kalayil

  Sheena Kalayil is an Indian-British author, whose debut – The Bureau of Second Chances (Polygon) – won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel, and was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Prize for Fiction with a Sense of Place. She grew up in India and Zambia and has worked as a teacher all over the world, including in Nepal, Mozambique, Tunisia and Venezuela. Since 2002 she has lived in the UK, and now works at the University of Manchester. The Others (Fly On The Wall) is her fourth novel. 

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  Sarah Mellor

  Sarah Mellor is a novelist and psychotherapist based in Liverpool, where she has lived for nearly 30 years. She kickstarted the process of writing her debut novel by attending an Arvon crime-writing course and taking part in the Literary Consultancy’s mentoring programme. The Departed was published by HarperNorth in 2025 and Sarah’s second novel, The Silent Places, publishes in Spring 2026. 

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  Sally O'Reilly

  Sally O’Reilly was born in Stoke-on-Trent and lives in Sheffield. She’s published two contemporary novels with Michael Joseph/Penguin and has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Brunel University. Her historical novel Dark Aemilia (Myriad Editions/Picador US) was nominated for the Kirkus prize, and her short fiction has been published in Australia, South Africa and the UK.  

  Sally has worked as a senior creative writing lecturer for the University of Portsmouth and The Open University and her journalism has been published in the Guardian, Sunday Times and New Scientist. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Aston University. 

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  Caroline Roberts

  Caroline Roberts writes contemporary women’s fiction set in her beautiful home county of Northumberland. When she’s not in her writing room, you’ll find her out walking her two spaniels in the moorland hills and on the nearby sandy beaches. Family, friends, food and fizz make her smile. 

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  Robert Rutherford

  Robert Rutherford is an award-winning author and scriptwriter, whose books include Sunday Times bestseller Seven Days, and more recently, The Missing Hour, which topped the eBook charts in Australia and New Zealand. Prior to writing full time, he’s been a bookseller, pizza deliverer, karate instructor, football coach, and HR Manager. He lives on the North East Coast with his wife, children & overly needy dog, and is a founding member of the Northern Crime Syndicate crime-writers group. 

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  Daniel Tawse

  Daniel Tawse is an advocate for queer representation in literature for young readers and a keen historian with an MA degree in British History from the University of Northumbria. He lives on the North East coast where stories are told with heaps of heart and good humour and spent his childhood going on adventures in the wilds of Northumberland.  

  Daniel self-published his novella, Fairy Boys – about a queer teenager from Newcastle, experiencing gay romance for the first time – in 2019 and signed with Hachette Children’s Group in 2022. His first YA novel, All About Roman(ce), was published in 2023 and was listed for the Waterstones Children’s Prize. Two other titles quickly followed: Emmy Star is So Everything (2024) and This Book Will Make You Cry (2025).