Patrick Hussey
(Host)

Patrick is commissioning editor for the alternative culture website Run-Riot.com and has written journalism for several publications including the Independent on Sunday. He co-hosts the Dotpod podcast for RR and once upset a lot of poets but maintains he really did not mean to.

Ellie Watts-Russell (Host)

Born in 1979, Ellie Watts-Russell is a graduate of Andrew Motion's Creative Writing course at Royal Holloway. In 2006 she was appointed Writer-In-Residence at HMP Ashwell, an all male prison in Rutland. She lives in East London. Ellie is represented by Simon Trewin of United Agents and is currently working on her first novel, entitled The Lodge.  

Emre Turkmen (Producer)

Emre is an architect and composer who lives in West London. Co-host of the Dotpod podcast which he also produces Emre is a long time despiser of books.

Gwendoline Riley

Gwendoline Riley was born in London in 1979, and grew up on the Wirral. She studied English at Manchester Metropolitan University, and became literary editor of the magazine 'City Life'. Her first two novels, Cold Water (2002); and Sick Notes (2004), both have protagonists in their early 20s, who live in Manchester. Her third novel, Joshua Spassky (2007), tells the story of Natalie, a British writer who travels to North Carolina to meet up with the title character, an American playwright. Cold Water won a 2002 Betty Trask Award, and was named one of 5 outstanding debut novels of 2002 by The Guardian Weekend Magazine. Joshua Spassky won a 2008 Somerset Maugham Award.

Author photo © Francesca Cornford

Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson has published fourteen books, of which the most recent are: Common Prayer (Carcanet, 2007, shortlisted for the 2007 T.S.Eliot Prize), On Listening (essays: Salt, 2007) and Writing: Self and Reflexivity (Macmillan, 2005). Her awards include the Newdigate Prize and the 2006 Forward Prize (shorlist); writers’ awards form the Arts Councils of England and Wales and the Society of Authors, and, in the US, the Literary Review’s annual Charles Angoff Award. After a first life as a violinist, she was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Nijmegen. She has a PhD in the philosophy of language and has held research fellowships at the universities of Oxford Brookes (2002-5) and Warwick (2007-8). She contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times and other publications; and is the editor-in-chief of Poetry Review.

Author photo © Kitty Sullivan

Annie Freud

Annie Freud was born in London in 1948. She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, maternal grand-daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great-grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud. Freud was educated at the Lycee Francais de Londres and then studied English and European Literature at Warwick University. Since 1975, she has worked intermittently as a tapestry artist and embroiderer, exhibiting work and undertaking commissions from people such as Anthony D'Offay, Jon Snow and Graham Norton. Her first full collection from Picador, The Best Man That Ever Was, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2007, and went on to receive the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award in the same year.

Author photo © Chloe Barter

Sam Riviere

Sam Riviere was born in 1981. He began to write poetry while at the Norwich School of Art and Design and completed a Masters at Royal Holloway in 2006 where he was taught by Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott. His poems have appeared in The Rialto, Poetry London, and various competitions since 2004. He co-edits the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives and is currently working towards a PhD at the University of East Anglia, for which he received an AHRC award. A pamphlet is forthcoming from Faber and Faber.