Russ Barr writes character-led fiction with heart and soul, sometimes dark, sometimes funny, but always trying to scratch beneath the surface of the human condition.

His debut novel, War Inc., is a darkly comic story about our insatiable appetite for content, and people who turn chaos into opportunity. He is also the author of the short story Crybully, published in 2024.

His current novel, Ten-Pound Note, is set in 1990s London and follows a single imperfect ten-pound note as it passes from person to person, revealing a chain of connected lives, bad decisions and unexpected consequences.

Russ is drawn to flawed characters, broken systems and the absurdity that often sits just beneath the surface of serious things.

Sylvia Vetta is a British author, freelance writer, and community activist whose work explores the intersections of gender, class, and race. Raised working-class in Luton, she married her Indian-born husband Atam Vetta at a time of widespread hostility toward mixed marriages, an experience chronicled in her acclaimed memoir Food of Love. As a freelance writer for The Oxford Times, she profiled 120 inspirational people from five continents in her popular Oxford Castaways series, later collected into three books. Her novels include Brushstrokes in Time, the only novel celebrating the courageous artists of China’s Stars Art Movement (including Ai Weiwei), Sculpting the Elephant set in Oxford and India, and Not so Black and White, co-authored with Nancy Mudenyo Hunt. A passionate library campaigner, she organised the Pied Piper Procession that helped save 20 libraries from closure, and has been involved in development projects for over 40 years, including help twin her village of Kennington with Musanda in west Kenya. She is a founder organiser of the Oxford Indie Book Fair and believes that art, music, and storytelling can connect people.

Born in Lancashire, Paul joined the British Army at 16 and served for thirteen years before leaving to pursue a career.

In 2022, Paul published his debut novel, The Stone of Radnor, a YA fantasy and the first in the Guardian of the Stone trilogy. He has gone onto to complete the series and in August of this year he published his fourth novel, a Fantasy / Sci-Fi thriller called The Emerald Passage.

Paul works full time as a cybersecurity consultant and aside from writing in his spare time, Paul enjoys country walks and helping his partner with her horses and ponies. He currently lives in Hampshire with his two teenage children and a very annoying cat.

“As the daughter of one of The Talliswood’s Ambassadors, it’s Aerva’s job to hold everything together. Eredhest’s war on her people may have ended, but there is always a cost to staying alive, and tensions are starting to grow again. Now, as part of a last-ditch peace deal, she has been shipped off to Udela Arkanium, one of Eredhest’s finest schools, right in the heart of enemy territory. All she has to do is get to the end of the school year alive, and without making too many enemies, and her people might stand a chance of surviving.

But when a mysterious assassin breaks into the temple on a mission to kill a teacher, Aerva’s life is suddenly turned on its head. With the help of a troubled poet, a healer from the wrong side of the mountains, and a killer who cannot kill, Aerva sets out to unravel a plot that could threaten the whole world…

…and maybe, just maybe, she’ll be able to save herself in the process.

‘A Constellation of Shadows’ is the debut, YA fantasy novel by Kay Rowan, and Book One of the upcoming Talliswood Series. The book has been described as Shadow and Bone x His Dark Materials, and is rich with found family vibes and queer representation. When she isn’t coming up with useless bits of world building, (did you know that the traditional food of The Andalian Archipelago is spiced honey cake?), Kay can be found writing songs as ghostgirl, composing music for the stage and screen, and navigating an existential crisis (or four).”

“Dr Lorna Robinson is the founding director of the Iris Project, a charity which runs a range of classics-based initiatives in state schools and communities. She is also the founding director of the Rumble Museum at Cheney School, the first accredited museum in a school.

Her latest novel is “Oread”:

“Two hundred years have passed since the UK government instituted a bold new programme to pair every citizen with a tree. Known as the Hamadryad Charter, it created vast national forests, major civic festivals and a whole new system of personal names. Deep in the tunnels beneath London, a community has been growing which rejects the Charter. Tensions between the two societies are rising sharply. When a lone Hamadryad finds his way into the underground, a terrible tragedy threatens to unfold. Oread is the sequel to Hamadryad, but can be read as a standalone novel.”

She is also the author of three other novels.

Hamadryad – is a blend of sci-fi, ancient Roman religion and dystopian fiction, the novel imagines a near future where humans are bonded to trees.

The Birder – is a magical realist novel set in a world where people transform into animals instead of dying. The novel is illustrated throughout with linocuts depicting birds in locations around the city of Oxford.

Flower Gathers – is inspired by the mysterious Minoan Civilisation, the novel re-imagines both ancient lives and modern ones in a new exploration of an ancient setting.”

Josie Jaffrey (she/her) writes about lost worlds, dystopian societies and morally-ambiguous monsters (vampires are her favourite). Her queer vampire detective novel May Day won the Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Award 2021. She is the founding editor of fantasy magazine Indie Bites and writer of the urban fantasy podcast Jack Valentine, Vampire Detective.