Current residents
Anaïs Van Ertvelde (April 2026)
Anaïs Van Ertvelde (b. 1988, she/her) is a Belgian writer and historian. She teaches at the art college KASK and writes books, essays, columns, and podcasts focusing on sexuality, gender, the body, and disability.
In 2017, she co-authored Vuile Lakens: Een hedendaagse visie op seksualiteit (Dirty Sheets: A Contemporary Vision of Sexuality) with writer and journalist Heleen Debruyne, based on their podcast series of the same name. Her essay Zorgangst (Care Anxiety), which explores feminist and crip fears surrounding receiving and providing care, was published in 2022. In 2024, she released Handicap: Een bevrijding (Disability: A Liberation). In this book, she dissects what the world tells us about disability, and illuminates what disability can tell us about the world. Currently, she is working on her first novel.
This residency is part of our exchange with Passa Porta house of literature in Brussels.
Dieter Rogiers (April 2026)
Dieter Rogiers is a Belgian author, film critic and copywriter from Brussels. Selected in 2004 as one of ten promising young Flemish writers, Dieter has written several award-winning short stories and graphic novels, including De Wraak van de Walgvolgel (The Dodo’s Revenge), Tunguska and De parelvisser (The Pearl Fisher). His first novel, the Brussels-based Bot Mes (Dull Blade), received the Fred Braeckman Award for best Flemish thriller debut in 2023. Ambitious follow-up De Moskou Film Klub (The Moscow Film Club), set in mid-eighties Soviet Union, is expected later in 2026.
In Norwich, Dieter will be working on Een goede dood (A Good Death), an anecdotal narrative deeply rooted in the Asian kishōtenketsu storytelling tradition. The novel tackles loneliness, mourning and imperfect lives cut short, and is dedicated to his recently deceased mother.
This residency is part of our exchange with Passa Porta house of literature in Brussels.
Future residents
Dong I-Hyang (November 2026)
Dong I-Hyang is a Seoul-based playwright who also works as a director and film director. Her plays include Liver and River (National Theatre of Korea, 2024), Blackout (Arko Arts Theatre, 2018), Floating Land (Daehangno Arts Theatre, 2016), Almost Electra (National Theatre of Korea, 2014), and One Day, Four Doors (Arko Arts Theatre, 2009). As a playwright-director, she has created a series of interdisciplinary and site-specific works, among them An Ancient Memory of the Sun and Moon — selected as ARKO Repertory of the Year and officially invited to the Kiupiu Festival (2022) — and Alley Noir: In Search of Richard III (Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, 2021).
Between 2019 and 2020, she worked at This Planet Theatre (이행성 극장), an independent experimental space in Seoul, where she developed and staged Subway Ontology — Dancing Without Dancing and Alley Noir, deepening her practice at the intersection of spatial dramaturgy and devised performance. Her play collections One Day, Four Doors (2016) and Liver and River(forthcoming 2025) are published in Korean.
Her work has been recognised with the 7th Yun Young-sun Theatre Award (2020), the 14th Cha Beom-seok Playwriting Award for Liver and River, the ARKO New Work of the Year for Blackout (2017), and the ARKO Excellent Play designation for Floating Land (2014).
This residency is funded by Arts Council Korea.
National Centre for Writing – Visible Communities (Virtual Residency)
From March to June 2026 National Centre for Writing will be hosting three literary translators in virtual residence.
Yaqi Xi
Yaqi Xi is a literary translator and postgraduate researcher based in Coventry, UK. Her practice-based PhD adopts an aurally attuned, ecological approach to translating and audio-remediating post-socialist and post-industrial Chinese fiction, creating ambient digital literary narratives embedded in the cultural soundscapes that shape these stories. Working with multimodal and intermedial methods – including field recordings, performative narration, and experimental sound design – she explores how ambient audio literature can generate affective atmospheres, amplify under-represented voices, and facilitate situated encounters for transnational audiences. Her work also positions literary translators as creative producers, engaging with digital-audio practices that open new pathways for how translated literature can be made and experienced.
She is currently working on translations of Ban Yu’s fiction; her English translation of his short story ‘Chorus’ (歌队) appeared in Eunoia Review in 2025. Beyond translation and audio-making, she also reads YA fiction for young audiences in community arts spaces.
Ecre Karadag
Ecre Karadag is a Japanese–English literary translator and publishing professional based in London. She holds an MA in Translation and a BA in Japanese and Linguistics from SOAS, University of London, and an MA in Japanese Studies from Sophia University in Tokyo. Alongside her translation work, she is Marketing & Communications Manager at the Poetry Translation Centre and facilitates a weekly community poetry group in London. She was the 2024–25 Japanese mentee on the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translators Mentorship, working with Polly Barton, and is currently working on multiple book-length literary translations, including the forthcoming Mari the Unwonderful Witch by Asako Yuzuki (Penguin Random House Children’s).
Image © Christy Ku
Elete Nelson-Fearon
Elete Nelson-Fearon is a translator, editor and educator working between Arabic, Spanish and English. Elete was a recipient of the 2025 American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) Travel Fellowship, as part of which she attended the ALTA48 conference and presented her translation of Palestinian Chilean play Irreversible Palestine. Elete has translated, and facilitated workshops around, plays from Mexico, Egypt, Cuba, Palestine and Spain.
Past residents
2026
Megan Bradbury (March 2026)
Megan Bradbury is a British writer, tutor, and mentor, and author of the critically acclaimed novel, Everyone is Watching (Picador, 2016). Described as a ‘beating heart of a novel’ by Ali Smith and ‘kaleidoscopic’ by Eimear McBride, the novel was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and was listed as one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2016. Bradbury is a graduate of the Creative Writing Prose Masters programme at the University of East Anglia, and has been awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship, an Author’s Foundation award, and numerous grants from Arts Council England. She has written for the Irish Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She is also an experienced artistic collaborator and a previous recipient of the Escalator Literature Prize. Image © Ali Smith
This residency is an Early Career Residency, exclusive to alumni of our Escalator New Writing Fellowships. Supported by The Fenton Arts Trust.
Alex Scarlett (March 2026)
Alex is a literary fiction writer based in Brighton. Her work explores themes of food, friendship and female rage. Since taking part in the Escalator programme, she has been shortlisted for The London Magazine Short Story Award (2017) and won first place in the 2018 Sunderland University in Association with Waterstones Short Story Award. Her most recent novel, Vanilla, earned her a place on the Curtis Brown Creative Course, and this is what she’ll work on during the residency. A closely observed study of trauma and the impulse to recover, Vanilla examines what a single moment of violence can take from you – and the price of attempting to retrieve it.
This residency is an Early Career Residency, exclusive to alumni of our Escalator New Writing Fellowships. Supported by The Fenton Arts Trust.
Amélie Prévost (March 2026)
Amélie Prévost is a spoken word artist. She has created many shows such as the solo performance Kamikaze du vendredi, and Fol ouvrage (Torcher des paillettes) with Elkahna Talbi (Queen Ka). With the help of Circuit paroles vivantes, these two shows went toured in Canada and France for several years. She was the World Cup poetry slam Champion in 2016 in Paris. She has published three books of poetry. Her latest, Osti d’pain blanc, published by Éditions de l’Hexagone, was a finalist for the CoPo des lycéens award in 2024. She is also a member of the group Primaires, les couleurs secondaires. The manuscript of their show Bleu noyade was published with Planète rebelle in 2025. Image © Julia Marois
Rachel McCrum (March 2026)
Rachel McCrum is a poet, performer, editor, and curator. Originally from Northern Ireland, she lived in Edinburgh, Scotland between 2010 and 2016, where she was the first BBC Scotland Poet in Residence and recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Her debut collection The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate was translated by Jonathan Lamy and published in a bilingual edition with Mémoire d’encrier in Fall 2020, and was a finalist for the Le Prix de traduction de la Fondation Cole from the Quebec Writers’ Federation in 2022. Rachel is the vocalist for noise-poetry group Pigs&Wolves. Image © Nine Desbaillet
Jane Menczer (March 2026)
Jane Menczer won an Escalator New Writing Fellowship and a Grant for the Arts to help fund her first novel, An Unlikely Agent, which was published in 2017. She is currently completing a new novel, which explores the unreliability of memory and the limits of what we can know about other people, even those closest to us. Jane lives and works in Cambridge.
This residency is an Early Career Residency, exclusive to alumni of our Escalator New Writing Fellowships.
Nabeela Ahmed (January 2026)
Nabeela Ahmed is a writer, multilingual poet and spoken word artist. Her debut poetry collection, From Kashmir to Yorkshire, was launched this year at Bradford Literature Festival via Yaffle Press. She hosts Bradford Writes, which platforms regional published writers and she is responsible for organising the first public Pahari Mushaira in Britain through Intercultured Festival. She has featured on Word of Mouth with Michael Rosen on Radio 4 and The Verb. Her project The Pahari-Pothwari Literature Project delivered two new bilingual anthologies for City of Culture Bradford 2025. She has been the Travelling Poet for Word Up North this summer and one of the core poets for BBC’s Contains Strong Language.
Nabeela’s residency is part of the Visible Communities programme and is supported by the Francis W Reckitt Arts Trust.
2025
Annalise Peters, Csilla Toldy, Wen-yi Lee, David Colmer, Charlotte Van den Broeck, Leon Sofie Verraest, Sithuraj Ponraj, Joheun Lee, Luke Allan, Raquel Pena Martínez, Emily Barr, Choo Yi Feng, Clara Chow, Inbha, Melanie Lee, Esther Vincent Xueming, Choi Ji-In, and Sasti Gotama.
2024
Maarja Pärtna, Penny Boxall, Christina Ng, Soje, Gabriel Wu, Mikołaj Denderski, Shengchi Hsu, Yu Teng-Wei, Seo Su-Jin, Phương Anh, JC Niala, Elhum Shakerifar, Jerrold Yam, Lisabelle Tay, Marylyn Tan, and Joyce Chua.
2023
Vida Adamczewski, Maddie Mortimer, Cate West, Amarylis De Gryse, Anxhela Çikopano Hoxha, Marija Girevska, Laimonas Briedis, Akvilė Kavaliauskaitė, Gabriela Manova, Dragana Erjavšek, Meihan Boey, Andina Subarja, Noor H. Dee, Hsuan Pai and Amanda Addison, Paige Aniyah Morris, Wayne Rée, Carole Hailey, Csilla Toldy, Santanu Bhattacharya, Rabi Thapa, Nadiyah Abdullatif, Margot Douaihy, Anam Zafar, Lee Yeon Ju, Elhum Shakerifar, Tse Hao Guang, Sim Wai-chew, and Nur-El-Hudaa Jaffar.
2022
Akshita Nanda, Crispin Rodrigues, Daryl Qilin Yam, Megan Bradbury, Juliette Bernatchez, Arthur Reiji Morris, Shin Jung Keun, Hayahisa Tomiyasu, Dawid Mobolaji, Yelena Moskovich, Els Beerten, Penny Boxall, Soobin Kim, Clare Richards, Adrija Ghosh, Nadiyah Abdullatif, Lydia Hounat, Vineet Lal, Coco Mbassi, Shagufta Sharmeen Tania, Sylvie Marie, and Diana Evans.
2021
Yvette Siegert, Shagufta Sharmeen Tania, Charlotte Geater, Mattho Mandersloot, Anne Amienne, Carrie Patten, Julia Webb, Jennifer Anne Champion, Nuraliah Norasid, Nazry Bahrawi, Derek Barretto, Rabi Thapa, Gitanjali Patel, Sawad Hussain, Anam Zafar, Alexandra Birrell, Megan Bradbury, Liz Breslin, Lynn Buckle, Vahni Capildeo, Valur Gunnarsson, Marcin Wilk, and Shash Trevett.
2020
Thomas Heerma van Voss, Paddy Richardson, Anita Terpstra, Vahur Afanasjev, Motoyuki and Hitomi Shibata.
2019
Kim Heayon, Kang Young-sook, Katie Hale, Bregje Hofsted, Eva Meijer, Ekaterina Petrova, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Nuril Basri, Agustinus Wibowo, Jeremy Tiang, Anton Hur, JY Yang, Yoshitaka Haba, Kathleen Vereecken, Debby Lukito Goeyardi, and Reda Gaudiamo.
2018
Jun Sung Hyun, Jeongrye Choi, Ivanka Mogilska, and Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh.
