Paul Stephenson writes horror and science fiction, made by hand to be read by lamplight.

His apocalyptic horror trilogy, Blood on the Motorway, has been an Amazon bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic; his dystopian sci-fi serial, The Sunset Chronicles, terrifies and delights fans of science fiction and horror alike; and his vampire saga, Darkness Rises, brings an ancient bloodlust to modern York.

A former journalist with a diploma in Creative Writing from Oxford University, his stories have been featured on the chart-topping horror podcasts The Other Stories and The Night’s End, and he is the creator of Bleakwood, tales of terror from a mysterious English town.

He lives in England with his wife, two children, and one hellhound.

The Berthe the Witch series of books consists of 14 books in French and 2 translated into Spanish for children learning those languages. The stories are about a green witch called Berthe and her cat, who loves ice cream. The language is simple and is based on the themes covered in school: description, weather, clothes, family, a visit to a restaurant, shop or Paris etc.. As the author I have had fifty years of teaching languages to children to know what to include and try to make them fun.

Each book contains a story, a word search, a game to make and a list of vocabulary. Each French book has a QR code on the back which links to the story being read. There are also two quizzes on my website for each book.

The books are used in schools across the country and abroad and featured in an article in the Scholastic Junior Education Plus magazine under the title Ten of the Best MFL Resources. They were the only storybooks mentioned.

Most importantly, children say that they enjoy the stories because they can understand them and they make them laugh.

After 40 years (and counting!) of writing scientific papers, books and patents where almost every sentence needs to be justified with a reference, I suppose I longed for being able to write something which did not have any boundaries. Having recently become a part-time consultant scientist and with all four children having now left our house, there is some time for me to let my mind wander through those things that do not need to be proved; do not have to be true. But the scientist in me hasn’t allowed me to stray that far from the truth or reality and that’s pretty much how I ended up writing ‘A Painkiller to Die For’ (2025). This was my second published novel after ‘A Practical Arrangement’ which came out towards the end of 2023 under the nom de plume of Verity Trevethan.

My third novel, ‘The Disappearance of Sarah Griffiths,’ has a publication date of 28th November and also has a smattering of science running through the plot. My editor has labelled this book as ‘Gone Girl meets Breaking Bad’ and I think I can see where she is coming from. It is a dark, domestic noir based around a young married couple whose comfortable existence is crumbling around them. The life changing events lead to the wife’s disappearance and a criminal investigation looking into the death of a small-time drug dealer. The novel asks questions to just how far we’ll go to protect the ones we love and the lives we’ve built and what we become when they start to fall apart.

Peter Tickler is an established writer of crime fiction, mostly set in and around Oxford. He has been much praised for the authenticity of his Oxford (‘a wonderful gift of creating geographically factual settings for his fictional characters’ – Oxford Times) as well as the pace of his stories (‘deliciously thrilling and wildly unpredictable’ – Oxford Today).

He studied classics at Keble College, and later settled with his wife and family in South Oxford. He worked in the IT dept of the Potato Marking Board in Between Towns Road, and from the computer room he looked down into the carpark of the Cowley police station. So it was inevitable that his irascible protagonist DI Susan Holden was based there. He loves setting his crimes in places he knows, and describes himself as ‘town, not gown’.

His latest (and 10th) crime story is Death in the Sea Pool, set in Bude where he has spent many off-season holidays. He insists that ‘sometimes I need a change of scene!’.

He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, and gives talks at festivals, libraries, U3As, Women’s Institutes and even at one of His Majesty’s Prisons. (They let him out eventually!).

His great-grandfather founded Tickler’s Jam Company, which supplied jam to the British troops and became a household name in the First World War. This was the inspiration for his novel The Tickler’s Jam Murders.

Peter Lovesey (winner of 3 CWA daggers) emailed him: “I was bamboozled by the solution to the puzzle. Bravo.”

Marian Eastwood is the founder of the Oxford Poetry Circle in Oxford, UK and hosts monthly poetry and open mic events with featured poets.

Her debut poetry collection. Secret Codes was published last June 2025.

She served as a Labour Attaché for the Philippine Mission to the United Nations and other International Orgsnisations for seven years in Geneva, Switzerland after being the Welfare Officer for the Philippine Consulate in Milan Italy.

She founded the Boracay Paraw Regatta and International Arts Festival and managed it for seven years from 1992-1998, on Boracay Island in the Philippines.

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.