Sifters and Readers

Anna Woodford is the author of six poetry books and pamphlets: Everything is Present (Salt, 2025); Changing Room (Salt, 2018); Birdhouse (Salt, 2010); Party Piece (Smith Doorstop, 2009); Trailer (Five Leaves, 2008); and The Higgins’ Honeymoon (2003). She has won an Authors’ Foundation award, an Eric Gregory award, a PBS recommendation, an Arvon/Jerwood apprenticeship and two Northern Writers’ Awards.

annawoodford.co.uk

Jade Cuttle is a nature writer from Yorkshire and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2024. She is poetry critic for the Observer and is an award-winning writer. She worked at The Times as an Arts Commissioning Editor, and is a regular speaker on BBC Front Row and BBC Freethinking. Her AHRC-funded research examines the work of British nature poets of colour. She is the founder of consultancy agency StorySphere.

Roshni Gallagher is a poet from Leeds living in Edinburgh. Her debut collection Even the Trees is forthcoming with Bloodaxe in Autumn 2026, and was the co-winner of the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Her debut pamphlet Bird Cherry was published by VERVE Poetry Press in 2022.

Abby Walker is a County Durham writer with a Creative Writing MFA from Manchester Writing School. She won the 2024 Finchale Award, was chosen for the 24/25 London Library Emerging Writers Programme, and received a Faber Academy scholarship. In 2025, she was listed for the Cheshire Novel Prize; Stockholm Writers Festival, Sid Chaplin, and Edinburgh Short Story Awards; and the Writers & Artists Short Story Competition. She is published in Motives Unknown (Dead Ink, 2025).

Crista Ermiya is a short story writer. Her collection, The Weather in Kansas (Red Squirrel Press, 2015) was included in Best British Short Stories (Salt, 2016) and was awarded a Read Regional title by New Writing North. Recent publications includes stories in Test Signal: A Northern Anthology of New Writing (Dead Ink, 2022), and the Beltane and Samhain issues of General Witchfinders (2025), the zine of the British Horror podcast of the same name.

Françoise Harvey has most recently been published in Weird Horror, The Dark, Black Static and Interzone, Best British Short Stories 2017 (Salt) and more. She has been shortlisted for the Bristol and Bridport Short Story Prizes, and top 50 in the BBC National Short Story Award. She has won a Northern Writers’ Award (2017), an ACE DYCP grant (2021), and was selected for 2024/25 Writers’ Block North East.

francoiseharvey.wordpress.com

Micaela J Ralph is a queer speculative fiction author represented by CAA. Her debut novel, Bones in the Water, explores catastrophic storms, found family, failing systems, and the ways people keep going even as the world ends. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and is currently developing a horror audio fiction podcast. She lives and writes on a Kentish cliffside, distracted daily by good sunsets and her dog.

James Nicol is the author of the bestselling Apprentice Witch children’s book series, and more recently The Cloud Thief and The Spell Tailors. He has loved books and stories his whole life. As a child he spent hours absorbed in novels, watching epic 1980s cartoons or adventuring in the wood at the bottom of the garden. He lives in Yorkshire with his partner and a black cockapoo called Bonnie.

Lisette Auton is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in Darlington, who works as an author, playwright, activist, creative practitioner, mentor, film and theatre maker, and performer. Her middle grade novels, most recently Lights Up and The Starlight Rebel, are published by Puffin. Lisette’s work focuses on identity, curiosity and play, kindness and access. Disabled, neurodivergent and northern, some say she’s a word artist; she says she does stuff with words.

lisetteauton.co.uk

Shaun Wilson is the author of Malc’s Boy, which won a Northern Writers’ Award in 2022. An excerpt was published by Granta in 2024. His work in Kit de Waal’s working-class anthology Common People (Unbound, 2019) led Kerry Hudson to tip him ‘for big things’ in the Observer. He has featured at book festivals, on BBC Radio, and 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 Northumbria University and Teesside University. 

Lynsey Rogers is a writer and arts worker based in Edinburgh. Lynsey has over 10 years’ experience working in writer development as the Writing Communities Manager for Scottish Book Trust. She also works as a freelance pastoral mentor, dramaturg, script and submissions reader, authenticity reader and event chair. Lynsey’s theatre work has been produced by Live Theatre and they have an upcoming publication in the anthology Queerphoria (Verve Books, 2026).

Mia Walby has a background in English from Oxford and Cambridge and tells people she is from Newcastle, but is actually from Northumberland. She read fiction for the 33rd edition of The Mays Anthology and has been published in the Times Literary Supplement and the Oxford Review of Books. Privately, she is/ Dabbling in writing haikus/ But with mixed results.