BIOS AND LINKS

Winnie M Li is an author and activist. Taiwanese-American and raised in New Jersey, Winnie studied Folklore and Mythology at Harvard. She has written for travel guidebooks, produced independent feature films, programmed for film festivals, and developed eco-tourism projects. After earning an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, she now writes across a range of media, including fiction, film, journalism, and memoir.

Her debut novel Dark Chapter won The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize in 2017, was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and has been translated into ten languages. She is currently adapting it for feature film. Her second novel Complicit will be published by Orion Fiction (UK) and Simon & Schuster (US) in Summer 2022.

Winnie has delivered over 150 public talks and appeared in TEDx London, The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The Times, The Independent, The LA Review of Books, Sky News, and BBC Woman’s Hour, among other media outlets. She has an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, in recognition of her writing and activism. http://www.winniemli.com/

Sharlene Teo wrote her debut novel Ponti (Picador, 2018), which won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award, was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Award and Edward Stanford Fiction Award, longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and selected by Ali Smith as one of the best debut works of fiction of 2018. Her work has been translated into eleven languages and published in places such as the TLS, Lit Hub, Vogue and the Daunt Books anthology At the Pond.

She is the recipient of the 2012 UEA Booker Prize Foundation scholarship, 2013 David TK Wong Creative Writing fellowship, 2014 Sozopol Fiction fellowship and 2017 University of Iowa International Writing fellowship.

Sharlene holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia, and is Lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Kent, specialising in Singaporean identity and self-perception, Southeast Asian historical fiction, and migration and diaspora.

Maria Garbutt-Lucero is a multi-award-winning publicist who has devised debut launch campaigns for Sally Rooney, Frances Cha and Édouard Louis, built campaigns for over a dozen bestsellers including Anna Burns' Man Booker Prize-winning Milkman, and worked with Dolly Parton, Zadie Smith, Irvine Welsh and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk.

She has won Publishers' Publicity Circle Awards for her work on Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. Her non-fiction PR work includes PPC Award-shortlisted campaigns for Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens paperback and Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge, as well as Phil Wang’s Sidesplitter, Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self, Arifa Akbar’s Consumed and Nadia Owusu's Aftershocks. She co-manages Florence Welch's online book club Between Two Books, founded #FilipinoFood4NHS and cooks Filipino food via her Filipino supper club Baboy Club.

Angelique Tran Van Sang is a literary agent at Felicity Bryan Associates, where she is building a list of fiction and non-fiction. She joined the agency in 2021, after seven years at Bloomsbury Publishing, where she was a commissioning editor working with authors such as Reni Eddo-Lodge, Olivia Sudjic, Jenny Zhang and Alexander Chee.

Ka Bradley is a commissioning editor at Penguin Press. She was previously a commissioning editor at Granta Books, where her authors included A.K. Blakemore, Jeremy Atherton Lin and Nina Leger. Her books and theatre criticism has appeared in the Observer, the TLS, The White Review, Time Out, The Stage and Exeunt. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Catapult, Somesuch Stories and The Tangerine, among others. She recently contributed an essay to Gifts of Gravity and Light, a nature anthology edited by Pippa Marland and Anita Roy.

Beyond the Immigrant Story with Winnie M Li and guests