Margaret Bateson-Hill [she/her] is a Brixton based author and a storyteller. She has published both picture and fiction books, including the prizewinning Masha and the Firebird and the Dragon Racer trilogy. Her books have been translated into many languages, including French, German Italian, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, Catalan, Korean and Polish. She has told stories in schools, libraries, museums and even royal palaces, from Brixton to Beijing. She is a co-director of Stepping into Stories Herne Hill Kids Lit Festival She is currently writing a mixture of picture books, poems and middle-grade fiction.

© Photo: Tricia Keracher-Summerfield

Annabelle Sami [she/they] is a writer working across prose, poetry and television. She has written 12 books for children, which have been shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, longlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award and Diverse Book Award, and won the Spark! Book Award and Stockport Children's Book Award. Her writing for adults has been featured in Writer's Mosaic, Peaks of Colour Nature Writing Journal and Fearlessly Magazine. Annabelle also works in the arts with several prominent theatre companies and artists, producing participatory and experimental work. She enjoys working dramaturgically and editorially on scripts to champion underrepresented voices and perspectives.

© Photo: Helena Banerjee

Fatima Najm [she/her] is founder of Creatives Against Poverty (www.creativesagainstpoverty.com), an artisan collective that uses craft practices rooted in nature to help vulnerable individuals, particularly refugees, to to ease their sense of displacement. As a facilitator of storytelling workshops, Fatima harnesses ancient arts like natural dye and bamboo weaves to keep ancestral knowledge alive.  Fatima  splits her time between working on refugee integration in London, to teaching at refugee camps in villages in Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand, and learning from locals how to apply ancient methods to a contemporary context. 

Karen Arthur [she/her] is a mother and grandmother in her early sixties. A former dance teacher, pastoral leader, fashion designer and model, she is now an author, broadcaster, Menopause Diversity campaigner, and founder of Wear Your Happy – a movement promoting conscious clothing for better mental wellbeing. Her debut children’s book, Grandma’s Locs, illustrated by Camilla Ru and published by Tate, was recently nominated for the Klaus Flugge Prize and celebrates Afro hair through the bond of a grandmother and grandson.

© Photo: Rich Barr Photography

Patrice Lawrence [she/her] was born in Brighton and brought up in an Italian-Trinidadian household in Sussex. Her first novel ORANGEBOY was one of the most talked-about YA books of 2016 and won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize for Older Fiction and the Bookseller YA Book Prize that year. Ever since, her work has consistently featured on prestigious prize lists and EIGHT PIECES OF SILVA recently won the Crime Fest Award for Best Crime Novel for Young Adults and the Jhalak Children's and Young Adult Prize for Book of the Year by a Writer of Colour. Patrice has been awarded the MBE for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

© Photo: Billie Charity and Hay Festival

Richard Pickard [he/him] is an award-winning children’s author whose debut novel, The Peculiar Tale of the Tentacle Boy, won the inaugural Chairman’s Choice Prize in the 2019 Times/Chicken House competition. He has worked in high-profile communications roles at Condé Nast and Louis Vuitton and now works as a film publicist for the British Film Institute. Based in London, Pickard writes middle-grade fiction with a strong focus on storytelling that blends imagination and heart.

© Photo: Rob Hayman