Tees Valley Writing Conference 2026

Amandeep joined Graham Maw Christie in 2025. She spent 10 years working as an editor, bookseller and agent, most recently at Penguin Random House and The Good Literary Agency. During her time as a commissioning editor, she published only debut authors and as an agent continues to champion new voices and works in-depth on concept and editorial development. Amandeep has judged the Future Worlds Prize, the Bloomsbury Mentorship Prize and the Little, Brown New Voices award and has been a reader for WriteNow, the 4th Write Prize and HarperCollins’ Author Academy. Her authors have won or been nominated for the Creative Future Award, Austrian Science Book Prize, Pushcart Prize and Attitude Pride Award. Amandeep also speaks French and Italian (and rusty Punjabi) and is seeking books with international appeal that entertain and inform.   

Anna Barker is a novelist, poet, and short story writer. Writing as Anna Ralph, her novels The Floating Island and Before I Knew Him (Penguin Random House) explore themes of unstable identity, the limits of knowing oneself and others, and the tension between perception and reality within fragile human relationships. She’s also published a collection of short stories (Rain Hare, Iron Press) and a collection of poetry (Book of Crow, Indigo Dreams) which toured as a Live Theatre dramatic reading in 2025. Her latest book, Dipped in Ink: A family portrait is a biographical memoir of her mother, the novelist, Dame Pat Barker. It is published in Spring 2027.

Isabelle Kenyon is the Managing Director of Manchester publishing house Fly on the Wall Press, and was named a Leader of the Year by the Bookseller in 2025. Founded in 2018, she has led Fly on the Wall Press to win Small Press of the Year at the British Book Awards 2024 (North), achieving finalist status five times in the years 2021-2025.

She is the MA Module Leader for ‘Publishing in the 21st Century’ at Arts University Bournemouth, and the author of psychological thriller The Dark Within Them, poetry collections including Growing Pains (Indigo Dreams) and one short story with Wild Pressed Books (‘The Town Talks’). She previously coordinated the Northern Fiction Alliance and runs PR campaigns for writers and publishers under Kenyon Author Services.

Kasim Ali was born and raised in Alum Rock, Birmingham. He is the author of Good Intentions, has written fiction for BBC Radio 4 and has a column at The Bookseller. His short fiction has been published in The Good Journal and longlisted for the 4th Estate and Guardian 4thWrite Short Story Prize, and Good Intentions was shortlisted for the Mo Siewcharran Prize. He works as an editor at Bonnier and now lives in London. Who Will Remain is his second novel. 

Kieron Fairweather is an Associate Agent at Peters, Fraser & Dunlop. After completing a BA and MA in English Literature at Northumbria University, Kieron went on to get his PhD from the same university in 2020, with a thesis focusing on themes of psychogeography, mapping, and the city in the works of Jean Rhys and Djuna Barnes. 

Having joined PFD as an Assistant to CEO Caroline Michel in 2021, he now works across frontlist and audio, and is building a list of literary, speculative, and narrative non-fiction.  

Louise Powell is an award-winning working-class writer from Middlesbrough. She has written prize-winning plays that have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra and performed at nine theatres, as well as commissioned short art films, ‘found’ poetry publications and audio documentary series. Louise was published in Kit de Waal’s acclaimed Common People anthology and has an MA from Durham University and a PhD in English from Sheffield Hallam University. She won the Sid Chaplin Northern Writers’ Award 2023 for the opening of Underdogs, which is her first novel.

Nicola Washington is an Instagram Strategist and Educator who helps authors and writers use Instagram to find readers, without losing their minds. After seven years in ecommerce social media marketing, she shifted her focus in 2023 to supporting writers, combining her professional expertise with her love of books. Nicola’s approach pushes back against the “more, louder, faster” culture of Instagram, prioritising storytelling and genuine connection to authors can be discoverable to and build trust with their readers.  

Paddy Crewe was born in Middlesborough. His first novel, My Name is Yip, was published by Penguin in April 2022 and was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and shortlisted for the BettyTrask, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. His second novel, True Love, was published to much acclaim in 2025. Set in the 1980s in the North East of England, True Love is a story of the trials of youth, the bonds of family and friendship, and of how much we are willing to risk to have ourselves be seen. 

Dame Pat Barker is the internationally acclaimed writer of 16 novels, including the Booker Prize-winning, The Ghost Road, from the Regeneration Trilogy, and the bestselling Women of Troy series. 

Shaun Wilson is the author of the novel Malc’s Boy, published by Conduit Books in April 2026. In 2021, an early draft won a Northern Writers’ Award, with an excerpt published by Granta in 2024. His work featured in Kit de Waal’s working-class anthology Common People (Unbound, 2019), leading the acclaimed Kerry Hudson to tip him ‘for big things’ in The Observer. He has featured at various book festivals, on BBC Radio, and recently completed a placement at Semiotext(e). He holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Northumbria University and has worked as an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Universities of Northumbria and Teesside. 

Sophie Mackintosh was born in South Wales, 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 by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in Spring 2018 and by Doubleday in the US in early 2019, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Her second novel Blue Ticket was published in Summer 2020, and her third novel Cursed Bread, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, in Spring 2023. She was included on the 2023 Granta Best Of Young British Novelists list. 

Writers’ Block North East (WBNE) is a creative writing development service based in Middlesbrough. 

Each year 12 writers are coached, taught and mentored throughout the creation of a first draft of a novel, and then they are introduced to top literary agents. 

 As a direct result of WBNE’s programme twelve writers have been made offers by prominent agents since 2018, and to date seven of their writers have been published. 

Through their work WBNE has facilitated the production of over 400 new pieces of work including plays, short films, radio dramas, zines, short stories, screenplays and novels since 2010. 

Degna Stone is a poet and poetry editor based in northeast England. They are a contributing editor at The Rialto, a co-founder and former managing editor of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine, and an associate artist with The Poetry Exchange. Degna holds an MA in Creative Writing from Newcastle University and received a Northern Writers’ Award for their poetry in 2015. They are a fellow of The Complete Works III and a recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship. They are also the current project manager for the Rebecca Swift Foundation, an organisation set up to advance the craft, creativity, and wellbeing of women poets in the UK.

Their debut full-length poetry collection, Proof of Life on Earth, was published in 2022 by Nine Arches.