Maria Victoria Lightwood

Maria Victoria Lightwood is an emerging writer currently working across fiction, plays, poetry, and film. Believing that every life challenge hides a punchline, she creates darkly comic narratives shaped by her psychology background and lived experience of chronic illness and estrangement.

In 2025, Maria was awarded Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice funding for literary development. Her writing has been recognised by Meg Pokrass in CRAFT flash fiction, spotlighted in DARK (Disability Action Research Kollective) magazine, Mid-Atlantic, and CRIPTIC, and featured in anthologies, literary journals, and disability advocacy spaces.

She is currently developing her debut novel, Fractured Tadpoles Grow in the Dark, and her play, Seppuku Doesn’t Cut It, alongside collaborative projects that champion intersectional disabled creatives. Find her at www.marialightwood.com and on Instagram at @mariavictorialightwood.

Robin Young

Robin Young is a student at Cambridge University who writes literary fiction and fantasy influenced by classical East Asian aesthetics and the Chinese zhiguai tradition. Writing the stories he wanted to read, his work blends Eastern literary traditions with contemporary forms. He was selected for the National Centre for Writing’s TLC Free Reads scheme in 2024. His current project is a historical-fantasy-metafiction exploring Li Bai’s legendary death reaching for the moon, reimagined as a romance between the poet and his readers across time.

Sabo Kpade

Sabo Kpade is a writer and researcher whose work explores themes of migration, identity, resilience, and belonging. His lyric memoir, Anyone’s Guest, reflects on this journey with formal inventiveness and cultural insight, blending personal narrative with broader social critique. Sabo’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Contemporary And (C&), Media Diversified and The Guardian Nigeria. He has been shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize, served as an Associate Writer with London’s Spread the Word agency, and his playwriting has been recognised by the Alfred Fagon Award and the U.S.-based A is for Abortion competition. Alongside Anyone’s Guest, he has completed two novels: Anyone’s Ghost, a queer campus story set in early 2000s Nigeria, and Anyone’s Grave, a post-conflict narrative about loss and resilience, which received detailed feedback from novelist Michael Donkor through The Literary Consultancy and the National Centre for Writing.

Thea Smiley

Thea Smiley is an emerging poet from Suffolk. After graduating from the UEA in 2012 with a BA (Hons) in English Literature, she published a few short stories, wrote five plays, and then turned her attention to poetry following her father’s death in 2019.

Her poems have been shortlisted and commended in a number of national competitions. In 2024, they were shortlisted for The Frogmore Prize and Second Light competition, and she was a runner up in the Metro Poetry Prize. In 2025, she won second prize in the Yaffle’s Nest competition, and was highly commended in the Ver Poets and Write Out Loud competitions.

Her work has also been published in magazines, including Ink Sweat & Tears, Lighthouse, Obsessed With Pipework and Butcher’s Dog, and in anthologies from Renard Press, the Wee Sparrow Press and Arachne Press.

She is grateful to have been chosen by the National Centre for Writing as a recipient of The Literary Consultancy’s Free Reads Scheme, as it gave her the objective and constructive feedback she needed to rewrite her debut collection and develop as a poet.