Contributors

Sophie Lévy Burton is a sculptor and painter living in Wiltshire. She is the founder and editor of MONK. An organic gardener she lives on ancient chalk soil on a sub-current of the St Michael Ley, next to an old medieval church with echoes of the forgotten long barrow on which it rudely stands. She plants trees for peace of mind, rolls with the seasons and remembers some of her past lives. She read theology at Cambridge.
www.sophielevyburton.com 


Sophie Lévy Burton
Sophie Lévy Burton

Catherine Coldstream was born in London, has lived and studied in Paris, and worked for Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. She has degrees from the Universities of Oxford and UEA and is working on a doctorate at London, Goldsmiths. When not writing she can be found playing her viola, mainly in chamber music groups in the Oxford area. She converted to Roman Catholicism in her twenties and spent 12 years as a nun in a contemplative monastery. Her memoir is forthcoming from Chatto and Windus. You can find her here: www.catherinecoldstream.com

Susanne Sklar was born in Chicago and is a member of the Cumnor Fellowship in Oxford where she teaches and writes about religion and the arts (including a recently-finished novel about Mary Magdalene). Before returning to Oxford, where she got her doctorate, Susanne taught humanities and theatre in Russia, China and Sweden, as well as at Northwestern University, Carthage College, and Shimer College in the U.S.  She’s written many academic publications. Additionally she’s been a peace researcher and activist, an actress, and a cowmaid.   Her love of William Blake and Dostoyevksy has inspired her to seek to unleash the beauty that saves the world.

Susanne Sklar
Susanne Sklar
Anna Zaranko
Anna Zaranko

Anna Zaranko is a freelance translator and editor living in the North of England. Apart from The Way of the Pilgrim, from Russian, her translations from Polish include: The Memoir of an Antihero by Kornel Filipowicz (forthcoming from Penguin Books), the photo-album Portrait of the Province by Jacenty and Katarzyna Dędek, and several short stories by the poet Julia Fiedorczuk. She is currently hunting for a publisher for a life of the female Argentine Surrealist painter: Leonor Gatti. 

Siddharth Dasgupta writes poetry and fiction from lost hometowns. His fourth book—A Moveable East—arrived in early ’21. A fifth book and third collection of poetry—All These Streets We’ve Known By Heart—emerged in October ‘22 via the independent publisher Red River. Siddharth’s literature has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Prairie Fire, Epiphany, Rogue Agent, Lunch Ticket, Kyoto Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He has read in cities like Bombay, Lucknow, Mandalay, Galle, Paris, Istanbul, and Isfahan. Siddharth serves as Editor, Visual Narratives with The Bombay Literary Magazine, but calls the Indian city of Poona home. You’ll find the writer on Instagram @citizen.bliss | https://citizenbliss.squarespace.com/

Siddharth Dasgupta
Maggie Wadey

Maggie Wadey is a novelist, screenwriter and poet.  Her mother was Irish and father English. In 2016  she published ‘The English Daughter’ (Sandstone Press) a memoir of her mother and Ireland. She has recently completed a novel, ‘Eros In Blue’, composed of eleven closely-connected parts, and in October ‘21 she won first prize in the Wells Literary Festival Open Poetry Competition. She also had the surreal experience of having a poem’ ‘They Came Like Swallows’ read out aloud in Parliament Square at an XR Demonstration. Maggie lives in Hackney, East London, with her husband and more than a thousand books.

Brunel James is an Anglican Priest based in Yorkshire. He studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University, and Theology and Biblical Studies at Oxford and Leeds. He is fascinated by human experience in all its diversity. He currently works for the Church of England’s Racial Justice Unit, and wants to see the church evolve away from its residual white/male/middle-class leadership model to embrace a culture where the gifts and perspectives of all our diverse community can be expressed.

Brunel James
Ruth Wiggins –  Image: Caleb Waterman

Ruth Wiggins is a writer and poet. She lives in East London but spends her happiest hours in the wild. Her poetry circles ideas of place, self-reliance, and kindness, and is informed by AR Ammons’s words To unite / everything that has / been made with / tenderness. Her heart has been recently stolen by a small wood in Aberdeenshire, to which she returns as often as she can. She has published in journals, anthologies and pamphlets, and her collection The Lost Book of Barkynge (Shearsman) was described as a book of “rare ambition and scope…a great cathedral of a thing”. Ruth studied English and Latin at Durham University and in between raising her three sons has worked as a photographer and bookkeeper, finding columns of numbers a good balance for the contemplative. She keeps an intermittent blog about muddy paths and poetry – mudpath.wordpress.com. Instagram @ruthwiggs66

Karen Fitzgerald The Queens Museum of Art, Islip Art Museum, Rahr-West Museum, Madison Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, the University of Arizona – Tucson and the United Nations in NYC have featured Fitzgerald’s work in their exhibition schedules. She received funding from the Queens Community Arts Fund, the Greenwall Foundation and the Women’s Studio Workshop.  Her work is in many private and public collections, including the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library, Related Group, The Four Seasons Hotel, the Rienhart Collection of Germany, Montefiore Medical Center, NYU Langone Medical Center, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NYC. She is a master teaching artist, working in a broad spectrum of settings, from community-based to University.

@kbfitzgeraldArt     https://fitzgeraldart.com/

Karen Fitzgerald
Nancy Campbell
Nancy Campbell

Nancy Campbell studied an apprenticeship in letterpress printing with Barbarian Press in the remote Canadian Rockies. Since then her curiosity about ink on paper has led her to work as a typefounder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; as a dealer in artists’ books in Covent Garden, London; and as editor of the quarterly art magazine Printmaking Today. Her books of poetry and nonfiction include How to Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet (winner of the Birgit Skiöld Award in 2013), Disko Bay (shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016) and a cultural history of a melting world, The Library of Ice. During 2019 she is a Fellow at Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany. 

www.nancycampbell.co.uk @nancycampbelle

Mbizo Chirasha,  born in 1978, is a Zimbabwean poet of international standing, an acclaimed wordsmith and performance poet, and widely published writer. He is currently a 2019 International Fellow at the International Human Rights Arts Festival (ihraf.org), a Brave Voices Poetry Journal Curator and globally certified literary arts and cultural influencer. 

Mbizo Chirasha
Mbizo Chirasha
Heidi Williamson
Heidi Williamson
photo credit: Angela Adams

Heidi Williamson is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She has worked in schools, museums, private companies and as a Writer-in-Residence. She studied poetry and prose at the UEA, and reads and delivers workshops regularly throughout the UK. Her first collection Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe, 2011) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. The Print Museum (Bloodaxe, 2016) won the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry. She works worldwide by Skype as a poetry surgeon for The Poetry Society – with students in the UK, India, Switzerland, Norway, Hong Kong, Singapore, Russia, Africa and the US. She also teaches for The Poetry School and mentors writers through the National Centre for Writing, The Poetry School and The Writing Coach. She finds it essential to carve out moments of calm in a busy day – making a pot of tea, watching the birds, having a bath, reading and walking are all essential maintenance for her creativity. She finds Tai Chi energising and relaxing. She is very at home with silence, and enjoys that poetry is also a great means of interrogating and curating different textures of silence.

www.heidiwilliamsonpoet.com
@heidiwilliamson


Carmen Bugan’s books include four poetry collections, most recently Lilies from America, which won a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, the memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police, and the critical study, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Her work has been translated into several languages and she is a regular contributor to Harvard Review Online. She was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford University, was a Hawthornden Fellow, the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, and in 2017 was made a George Orwell Prize Fellow. She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford. Bugan has been a guest on current affairs and history programs on the BBCABCNPRThe Foreign Desk (Monocle, London), and her poems have been featured in various places, including NPR’s The World of Ideas. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2021.

Carmen Bugan
Aleksander Carver

Aleksander Carver is an undergraduate at the University of York, reading English Literature. He was born and raised in the North East. He recently contributed to the Crossed Lines poetry project and is currently working on his first collection of poems. He has yet to put down literary roots, but strongly feels the pull of Woolf and Mauriac. He thinks he prefers to write in a hammock, although he has yet to do so.

Rachel Kelly is a judge of the Koestler Poetry Awards. Her memoir about how poetry helped her recover from depression ‘Black Rainbow: How words healed me – my journey through depression’ is published by Hodder & Stoughton. She runs ‘Healing Words’ workshops in schools, universities and prisons. Her most recent book is Singing in the Rain: 52 Practical Steps to Happiness published by Short Books, £12.99. Rachel Kelly, Writer, Mental Health Campaigner, Public Speaker.

Rachel Kelly
Rachel Kelly
Andreas Smith
Andreas Smith

Andreas Smith lives and works as a freelance editor in County Durham in the north of England. His articles and stories have been published in The GuardianThe Times and Storgy Magazine. Andreas has written several novels and is represented by David Grossman Literary Agency in London. His latest novel was inspired by and finishes in India, a country he frequently visits to write for months at a time, usually in the corner of a café while looking out on to the life of the streets outside. A graduate in mathematics and also in philosophy, he was awarded the C.E.M. Joad prize for philosophy in 1998.
https://andreassmithwriter.com/

Rory Spowers is Creative Director of the Tyringham Initiative, a world-class think-tank for consciousness studies. He is a writer, filmmaker and ecological campaigner and his books include Three Men on a BikeA Year in Green Tea and Tuk Tuks and  Rising Tides. In 2017 Rory worked on Bruce Parry’s feature length documentary Tawai. He is the co-editor of DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule, 2018 Simon and Schuster.
www.tyringhaminitiative.com

Rory Spowers
Rory Spowers
Himanshu Vyas
Himanshu Vyas
photo credit: Manav Singhi

Himanshu Vyas is chief photographer and columnist with the Hindustan Times, Jaipur, India. His photographs have won numerous awards including WAN IFRA China and at UNEP South Korea; he has exhibited his photographs and art works in India, Karachi and Adelaide. He teaches photography as visual literature and his chapters on photojournalism are taught at Masters degree courses. His haiku was awarded at ‘Autumn 2015 Haiku Contest’ of The Japan Information and Culture Centre (JICC) and the Japan-America Society of Washington. He makes documentaries, abstract poetry films and does Sound Design for plays.

Instagram @pauseinlight

Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (Orison Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020), and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014). In the last few years, he has been awarded fellowships and scholarships to the Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and other residencies and conferences.

Christopher Linforth
Christopher Linforth
Sophia Ann French

Sophia Ann French is a journalist, poet, and student of yoga and Indian philosophy. Her primary spiritual practice is Vipassanā and she’s a regular practitioner of the technique as taught by Sri S. N. Goenka in the tradition of Buddha Gautama Siddhartha. Sophie’s writing on Indian classical art forms and Vedic metaphors is published in The Yoga Life, and her articles on yoga have been translated into Mandarin and Italian. She loves reading and writing poetry and spends her free time exploring abstract minimalism and geometry in modernist art movements like the Bauhaus School and the non-objective silence of V. S. Gaitonde’s deceptively simple work.

Website: https://theyogalife.substack.com/

Instagram: @sophiefrenchwrites

Simon Meier’s minimal frames are inspired by his love for black-and-white shadow-play, but living in India, his lens can’t escape colour – evident in his Indian street life series. He also works on documentary and art house projects where he experiments with black-and-white and film-like processing techniques. Being a Swiss native he loves to contrast the obedient landscape of his homeland with the beautiful chaos of India and the two countries have been his muse since he quit his corporate job in 2019 to pursue photography full-time. Simon is self-taught and loves to experiment with form and structure which he showcases in his fine art prints.

Instagram: @simoncaptrs

Simon Meier
S. Rupsha Mitra

S. Rupsha Mitra from Kolkata, India is an undergraduate Honours student deeply interested in works of spirituality and transcendence. Her favourite writer is Rabindranath Tagore. She loves to learn and write about culture and often experiments with translations and poetry. Her works have been published in Indian Periodical, Harbinger Asylum, Pif Magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal , Muse India, Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Science for the People Magazine, Brown Girl Magazine, The Kali Anthology – Poems by Indian women poets and are forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly, Ekstasis Magazine by Christianity Today and South Seattle Emerald. Her work has received honour in the National Lockdown Poetry contest for women held by eShe magazine. www.srupshapoetry.com

Anthony Gardner

Anthony Gardner is an Irish writer and editor based in London. He studied English at Oxford, where he specialised in Yeats and the Romantics, and has since become the author of two novels – The Rivers of Heaven and Fox – as well as a collection of poetry, The Pool and Other Poems. His poetry has been published in the London Magazine and his short fiction in The Tablet. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, whose magazine RSL he edited for 12 years. He is particularly thrilled to be a trustee of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, which cares for the house in Rome where Keats died.

Richard Martin read English at St John’s College, Cambridge. He is devoted to early modern drama and poetry and spends long summers re-reading Proust. His short stories happily function as homages to the Edwardian ghost story but his poetry is always original. He works a lot in collage due to his interest in accident and order, serendipity and design… and an inability to draw. He has a life-long interest in the occult and would identify himself, if pressed or for the purposes of a census, as a Thelemite. He is a Francophile, felinophile, bibliophile, oenophile, a passionate lover of psychedelia, ‘Krautrock’ and African funk.

Richard Martin
Richard Martin
photo credit: James Foster
MacGillivray
MacGillivray
photo credit: Anonymous Bosch

MacGillivray writes from the site of the dream poem, placing a great emphasis on visionary tracts that are situated in the various languages and folkloric images embedded deep within Scottish Gaelic culture. As such, these works are tracks back into a landscape for her which remains lost and always remains tantalising site for excavation. 
www.macgillivray.org.uk

Jacob Willer studied Fine Art at Oxford and is now a London based painter and art critic. He writes about art for The Spectator, Standpoint Magazine and his book ‘What Happened to the Arts Schools?’ is published by Politeia and available from their website. He is particularly concerned with how the history of art, and the tradition of art, could be made more relevant. He is currently writing a book on how to understand and enjoy painting in the European tradition. 
www.jacobwiller.com  @jacob.willer

Jacob Willer
Jacob Willer
James Burnett
James Burnett

James Burnett lives in Dorset and Thailand. He studied Astrophysics at university where he became interested in celestial photography. He taught A level photography at an independent sixth form college in London and has exhibited his work at galleries in London and Bangkok. He is the author of the student guide “Getting into Art and Design Courses” and organises portfolio preparation seminars for students in South East Asia who wish to study art and design at UK art schools. 
www.james-burnett.com

A.R. Thompson is a British writer, tutor and poetry curator; raised in France and the U.K, now living and writing in Oxford. Thompson teaches online courses for The Oxford School of Poetry, on subjects as varied as American Romanticism, and the relationship between movement and memory in Proust. He is about to begin an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford University. 

A R Thompson
A.R. Thompson
Corinna Ferros
Corinna Ferros

Corinna Ferros is a writer and teacher in north London. Her book ‘Eighteen’ – conversations with eighteen-year-olds – is published by Whyte Tracks in Spring 2019. She studied social and political sciences at Cambridge, European Studies at the LSE and documentary film-making at the Zelig in Bolzano, Italy. A former research assistant for Theodore Zeldin in Oxford, she is now working on an interview-based book ‘Transcendence and other Transgressions’. She lives in London with her husband, three choral singing children and her bedside cabinet. She enjoys listening to sacred music, outdoor swimming and train travel in her spare time.

Paul Deaton was born in London and raised in Wales. His Seren collection A Watchful Astronomy was a Poetry Book Society Winter Recommended Book 2017, a Jen Campbell read of 2017 and a National Poetry Book Group selected title (October 2018). Work is included in the Forward Prize Anthology 2019. Following the creative path for me and writing, allows me to be both in touch with people as well as the wider universe, it’s a very felt-sense integral higher thing; avoiding the creative purpose, as I did for many years was a form of self-alienation. Not a place I wish to return to. Twitter @pauldeaton28

Paul Deaton
Paul Deaton
Christopher James

Christopher James was born in Paisley, Scotland in 1975, and educated at Newcastle and UEA. A first prize winner of the National Poetry Competition, the Ledbury, Oxford Brooks, Crabbe and Bridport prizes he is also a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. He has published several collections, including Farewell to the Earth (Arc, 2011), The Manly Art of Knitting (Templar, 2011), England Underwater (Templar, 2012) The Fool (Templar, 2014) and The Penguin Diaries (Templar, 2017) consisting of 65 sonnets – one for each member of Captain Scott’s final, ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. 

His influences include Louis MacNeice, Keith Douglas, and John Betjeman, about whom he has written a trilogy of biographical plays – two of which were performed at the Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich. His poems have been described as ‘lyrical surrealism’ and pop culture, wartime, historical and environmental concerns often masquerade as entertainment. His winning poem for the National Poetry Competition, Farewell to the Earth was described as ‘the Egyptian Book of the Dead meets the Archers.’  

He is also the author of three Sherlock Holmes novels, including The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants (MX, 2015) and most recently The Adventure of the Beer Barons (MX 2020). He lives in Suffolk with his family, folding bicycle and ukulele and is brand manager for a large UK charity. He is currently completing a new collection of poems, and is on the home straight of a sci-fi novel set in the 1920s. 


David Somerville was born in Wiltshire in 1962 and studied at Salisbury School of Art 1978-80; Bath Academy of Art 1980-83; Chelsea School of Art 1984-85. He has exhibited in galleries and museums in the UK, USA and Europe including an Arts Council touring exhibition shown at such venues as Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; a Royal Overseas League exhibition in London and Edinburgh; group shows at Blains Fine Art Gallery London; Robert Sandelson Gallery London; and Galerie Enrico Navarra Paris. His solo exhibitions include a show with the British Council in Barcelona; Broadbent Gallery London; Wooster Projects New York; and George Billis Gallery Los Angeles.

A short film biography of David and his work was shown at the Tate Gallery, and his own films have been shown at various venues including Soho House London.

www.davidsomervilleart.com
Instagram: @davidsomervilleart
Instagram: @davidsomervillemixedmedia

David Somerville
Sophie James
Sophie James


Sophie James is a writer and journalist whose articles and fiction and have appeared in Alan Ross’s London Magazine, the Independent, Independent on Sunday and the Times. Along with Cornelius Mattey and Paul Wilkinson she founded the London based arts event, The Tulip Salon. She has lived in India, a place she returns to often, to refill and replenish her mind, body and soul. She currently lives in Lambourn with her son, pussycat and husband. 
www.sophiejames.com

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