British Council Literature Seminar

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of ten books including her memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (2021). She won the Booker Prize 2019 with her novel Girl, Woman, Other, the first black woman and black British person to win it. A #1 Sunday Times bestseller for five weeks, it spent 44 weeks in the Top 10 and has sold over a million copies. There are 60 translations of her books in over forty languages. Bernardine has received many other awards and honours including two British Book Awards. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, an International Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance and President of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Kit de Waal was brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. Her second novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for the Women's Prize and her young adult novel Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the Carnegie CLIP Award 2020. A collection of short stories, Supporting Cast, was published in 2020. An anthology of working-class writing, Common People, was crowdfunded and edited by Kit in 2019. Her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes was published in August 2022.

Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, Council of Society of Authors, a PBS New Generation Poet, presenter of the weekly Poetry Extra on Radio 4 Extra, Daljit Nagra, MBE, has published four poetry collections, all with Faber & Faber, which have won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Book, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award, and been shortlisted for the Costa Prize and twice for the T.S. Eliot Prize. 

Joelle Taylor is the author of four collections of poetry. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live, resident at the Southbank Centre, and an editor at Out-Spoken Press. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet will be published by Quercus in Spring of 2024, followed by her memoirs. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. 

Wayne Holloway-Smith has published two collections of poetry, Alarum (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), which was a Poetry Book Society Wildcard Choice, and Love Minus Love (Bloodaxe Books, 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ledbury Munte Prize for Best Second Collection. He won the National Poetry Competition in 2018, The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2016, and currently edits The Poetry Review.