Tessa Harris is a writer and poet currently at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester as a Commonwealth PhD candidate. She is writing her first novel and is interested in the formal techniques used in the combinations of text and image in narrative work. Born and raised in Windhoek, Namibia Tessa has had short stories and poetry published in Namibia, South Africa and the UK.

Ian McGuire grew up near Hull and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Virginia. In 2007 he co-founded the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing. He is the author of two novels, Incredible Bodies (2006) and The North Water (2016). The North Water was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, The Historical Writers Association Gold Crown Award, and was named one of the top ten books of 2016 by The New York Times.