VICTORIA BENNETT
Victoria Bennett is an award-winning disabled poet, author and carer. She founded Wild Women Press in 1999 and curates the Wild Woman Web and Wild Women Writers’ Salons, an inclusive online space focusing on nature, connection and creativity. After living 25 years in Cumbria, she moved to Orkney in 2022 with her husband and son, where she can often be found seeking sea-treasures on the shore with her cat, or growing her new apothecary garden in the village of Hope. Her debut memoir, All My Wild Mothers, was published in 2023.
DAVID (D.V.) BISHOP
D. V. Bishop writes the award-winning Cesare Aldo historical thrillers set in Renaissance Florence. His first, City of Vengeance, won the NZ Booklovers Award and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. The second Aldo novel, The Darkest Sin, won the CWA Historical Dagger last year. The third, Ritual of Fire, was longlisted for the 2023 McIlvanney Prize, while the fourth – A Divine Fury – is coming this June from Pan Macmillan.
GRAEME MACRAE BURNET
Graeme Macrae Burnet was born in Kilmarnock and now lives in Glasgow. His latest book Case Study was longlisted for the Booker Prize and included in The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022. His Bloody Project was shortlisted for the Booker, the LA Times Book of the Year and won the Saltire Prize. Graeme is also the author of the French-set Georges Gorski trilogy. His work has been translated into over twenty languages.
EIMEAR MCBRIDE
Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her second novel The Lesser Bohemians won the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and her third novel Stange Hotel was published to critical acclaim in 2020. In a 2018 Times Literary Supplement poll of 200 critics, academics, and fiction writers, McBride was named one of the ten best British and Irish novelists writing today.
MICHAEL PEDERSEN
Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet and author, and the Writer in Residence at The University of Edinburgh. His prose debut, Boy Friends, was published by Faber & Faber in 2022 to rave reviews and was a Sunday Times Critics Choice. He’s unfurled three collections of poetry, the most recent being The Cat Prince & Other Poems —which won the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Best Poetry. Pedersen has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry, and won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and the John Mather’s Trust Rising Star of Literature Award.
POLLY PULLAR
Polly Pullar is a naturalist, writer and photographer specialising in wildlife and countryside matters. She is also a wildlife rehabilitator specialising in red squirrels and birds of prey. She writes for numerous magazines and her books include – Fauna Scotica, Animals & People in Scotland; A Richness of Martens – Wildlife Tales from the Highlands; The Red Squirrel – A Future in the Forest; A Scurry of Squirrels – Nurturing the Wild; A Drop in the Ocean – Lawrence MacEwen & the Island of Muck; and The Horizontal Oak – A Life in Nature.
2023 AUTHORS
