Rochelle Scholar
Rochelle Scholar founded Mendham Writers in 2010. She has spent over twenty years working and teaching in community education in the Further Education sector and is an experienced manager of adult community provision. Rochelle has co-written over twenty titles for Hodder Education’s Livewire series with Brandon Robshaw and has had articles published as a freelance journalist. She is currently working on a reminiscence book project with Millman Street Resource Centre and working as a freelance tutor for the National Skills Academy.
Brandon Robshaw
Brandon Robshaw studied English Literature at Oxford University. He also has a PGCE in English from Swansea, and an MA in Philosophy from the Open University. He has had ten children’s novels published, including Puffin’s Tangsham Tigers series under the pseudonym of Dan Lee, and Orchard’s Sequest series under the pseudonym of Adam Blade. He has also written over 60 titles, both fiction and non-fiction, in Hodder Education’s Livewire series (a number of these were co-written with his wife, Rochelle Scholar). He is also a free lance journalist, with work published in the Times, the Guardian, the Independent, Junior, the New Statesman and Psychologies magazine. He regularly reviews paperbacks for the Independent on Sunday. He teaches Creative Writing for the Open University and Westminster University. ’The Infinite Powers of Adam Lloyd’ is due out in 2012 with Chicken House. His literary agent is Pollinger Ltd.
Melanie Welsh
Melanie Louise Welsh was born on the Isle of Wight in 1971 and spent her childhood there in the sailing town of Cowes. She now lives in Suffolk, near the coastal town of Southwold.
Melanie has worked in marketing for a variety of magazine and newspaper publishers. Following an MBA at Cranfield she became Publisher of MediaGuardian. Prior to writing Mistress of the Storm Melanie was Head of Strategy for a digital marketing agency whose clients included Innocent Drinks, Jordans Cereals, BSkyB and Nestle.
Melanie’s debut novel Mistress of the Storm is published by David Fickling Books, an imprint of Random House. It is the first of a four-part series. The second novel, provisionally titled Eye of the Storm is due to be published in summer 2011.
Aoife Mannix
Aoife Mannix is an Irish writer and poet based in London. Her first novel Heritage of Secrets was published in 2008. She is the author of four collections of poetry; The Trick of Foreign Words (2002), The Elephant in the Corner (2005), Growing Up An Alien (2007) and Turn The Clocks Upside Down (2008). She is currently poet in residence on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live.
Cath Drake
Cath has skills in both fiction and creative nonfiction, writing and performing. She has fifteen years experience in a wide range of mediums which include performance poetry, newspaper and magazine journalism, life story / oral history, media and PR, displays and visitor interpretative materials, community involvement projects, publications, books and radio.
She is an innovative workshop leader and experienced facilitator in creative writing, life story, oral history, creativity, interviewing, radio and media work.
Tamar Yoseloff
Tamar Yoseloff is a US-born, London-based poet. Her fourth collection, The City with Horns, which features a sequence of poems based on the life and work of Jackson Pollock, is due from Salt in May 2011. She is also the author of Marks, a collaborative book with the artist Linda Karshan and the editor of A Room to Live In: A Kettle’s Yard Anthology. She is a freelance tutor for the Poetry School in London and one of the judges in the inaugural year of the London New Poetry Award. Tamar spends most weekends on the Suffolk coast.
Anne Berkeley
Anne Berkeley’s collection The Men from Praga (Salt, 2009) was shortlisted for the inaugural Seamus Heaney Prize for best first collection. Previous publications include The buoyancy aid and other poems (Flarestack, 1997), and a selection in Oxford Poets 2002 (Carcanet). She was awarded a Hawthornden fellowship in 2004 and has won many prizes, including first prize in the TLS competition in 2000. She edited Rebecca Elson’s acclaimed posthumous collection A Responsibility to Awe (Carcanet, 2001) and is currently editor of the poetry journal Seam. She is one of the poetry group extraordinaire Joy of Six, with whom she has performed across the UK and in the USA.
Anne-Marie Fyfe
Anne-Marie Fyfe (b. Cushendall, Co. Antrim) has four collections of poetry including, most recently, ‘Understudies: New and Selected Poems’ (Seren Books, 2010); has won the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Prize; has organised and facilitated the Coffee-House Poetry reading series, plus workshops, classes and seminars, at London’s Troubadour Coffee-House since 1997, founded the creative-writing strand of the John Hewitt International Summer School in Armagh, co-founded, and co-organises, the Hewitt Spring Festival in the Glens of Antrim; has been writer in Residence for the Poetry Trust’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival; was chair of the Poetry Society from 2007-2010; and has taught creative-writing at festivals, conferences, literary venues, schools, colleges and writers’ groups for many years..
Kate Chisholm
Kate Chisholm is a writer and editor. She is the radio critic of The Spectator, and she teaches narrative non-fiction at City University, London. From 2007 until 2009 she was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Surrey. Her published works include Fanny Burney: Her Life (Chatto & Windus, 1998; Vintage, 1999) and Hungry Hell (Short Books, 2002). She has contributed an essay on ‘The Burney Family’ to The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney and also a chapter for Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s The Last Bungalow (Penguin India, 2007). ‘Best Bakery in Town’ tells of her family’s connections with the Indian city of Allahabad through several generations. Her latest book, Wits and Wives: Dr Johnson in the Company of Women, will be published in November 2011 by Chatto & Windus. She founded The Company of Words in 2009 to run workshops on professional writing.
Nichola Charalambou
Nichola Charalambou is the Director & facilitator of Creative Writes - Creative Writing workshops. The workshops are based in North London at a beautiful Victorian estate. The past year has seen partnerships with a supper club in East London and guest workshops – including a writing group in Bishop Stortford. Groups are small, motivational, supportive & tailor-made. Personal stories are often used as a starting point and there is no feedback on the writing. Content includes short story, poetry and character work.
Nichola has written creatively for as long as she can remember and training has included residential workshops with Natalie Goldberg in New Mexico, USA.
Nichola also manages and delivers community arts projects for the National Trust, at Sutton House in Hackney.
Ben Rogers
Ben Rogers is a poet based in Brighton. He has had work published in a variety of magazines including Magma, Succour and Popshot, read widely in London, New York and Australia and has written and performed for BBC radio. He was shortlisted for the Bridport prize in poetry. He has also written for the stage and had plays performed on the London fringe. He is currently working on a full collection of poetry and is part of the online writing project Genius or Not, inspired by the ideas of the experimental writing collective Oulipo.
Guy Meredith
Guy Meredith is an experienced scriptwriter, story editor and tutor. His writing credits include THE RUTH RENDELL MYSTERIES (ITV) and EINSTEIN (BBC) and he has story edited tv series in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. As a tutor he has taught regularly at the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union as well as at a number of universities and continuing education institutes such as the City Lit.
Bev Sell
Beverley Sell studied Fine Art at Middlesex University and Textiles at Goldsmiths College. She ran her own Knitting business before moving into teaching Art and Craft in the community. Bev also teaches at a number of Further Education Colleges in London including the City Lit. Whilst at university she was an exchange student to the School of Art in Venice, Italy. The Venetian landscapes,culture and architecture continue to inspire her own work, whether paintings,textiles or cards. She lives in Hastings, East Sussex mixing with locals, artists and tourists.
Lynne Rees
Lynne Rees is a poet, novelist, narrative non-fiction writer and award winning creative tutor. She is a recipient of the University of Kent’s Faculty of Humanities award for imaginative and innovative practices and has run AppleHouse Poetry Workshop Online, a free resource to apprentice and practicing poets, since 2007.
In 2011 she co-edited another country, haiku poetry from Wales (Gomer Press), the first national anthology of its kind, and is currently researching and writing a book on her home town in South Wales, Real Port Talbot, as part of the psycho-geography series of ‘Real’ books published by Seren Books.
She blogs on food and life, reading and writing (with recipes and writing prompts) as the hungry writer at http://lynnerees.com
Malika Booker
Malika Booker is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. Her poems are widely published in anthologies and journals including: Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) the India International Journal 2005, Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry (The Women’s Press, 1998). She has represented British writing internationally, both independently and with the British Council including Slovenia, New Zealand, India, and Azerbaijan. Her collection Breadfruit was published by flippedeye in 2008, and recommended by the Poetry Book Society. She is the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
http://www.myspace.com/malikaunplanned
Her first full collection, The Butcher’s Hands (Smith/Doorstop) was short-listed for the Aldeburgh/Jerwood Prize and was a PBS Recommendation. It earned her a place, in 2004, as one of Mslexia’s ‘Top Ten UK Women Poets’ and as one of the ’Next Generation’ poets – ‘the most exhilarating new voices to have emerged in the last ten years’ (PBS/Arts Council). Her third book, Lip, (Smith/Doorstop) was short-listed for the Forward Prize, 2008. She is currently working on her next collection, Otherwhere, with financial support from the ‘Grants for Arts’ scheme, Arts Council England.
Catherine teaches Creative Writing for the University of Sussex and The Arvon Founadation and runs an enrichment group for teenager writers at Varndean Sixth Form College in Brighton. Catherine is also a teacher at The Poetry School.
