Alison Taylor

Alison only recently began writing poems, observations and children’s rhyming stories as a curious creative outlet.  Her pieces draw on childhood, her work within broadcast television, primary school teaching and NHS Talking Therapies.   

She views life through a childlike lens and her narratives focus on confidence, self-belief and the importance of small consistent steps in building resilience.   

Focusing on life’s everyday challenges and failures, she highlights humour and absurdity to help reveal the positive glimmers.  She lives with chronic pain and is inspired by nature and the children and adults she supports and encourages. 

Hypocritically, Alison admits that she is intimidated by most things and was unsurprisingly surprised to win a Free Read through The National Centre for Writing and The Literary Consultancy.  She is grateful for a 1:1 session with author Nikki Sheehan where she received honest and constructive feedback for her picture book idea.   

Alison has recently contributed to Norfolk Wildlife Trusts’ Writer in Residence workshop with Melbourne based author Sam Sweeny along the theme of ‘Nature Being, Being Nature’, exploring nature, belonging and perspective.   

She regularly writes poems for and about the people in her life (consent optional), and she attends a local writing group.   

Emily Jane Webb

Emily Webb is an emerging writer from South Norfolk currently based in Cambridge. She has an undergraduate degree in Fine Art and a master’s degree in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology both from the University of Oxford. Her fiction writing builds on her own experiences to weave together reflections on love, place, regionality, art making and the relationship between mothers and daughters. She is particularly interested in miscommunication and ambiguity and what it means for someone to seem unclear, for their words, their actions and the meanings that they give them to fail to make sense in the context that they’re in, and how we can find love where there is also misunderstanding.  

Made up partly of vignettes, her novel in progress VAGUE is set in South Norfolk. It follows the character M, who has recently returned home to countryside to live with her mother after finishing university and realises that in her uncertainty about her future and her current situation, she has developed an instinct not to be clear, to filter her thoughts as they move from her brain to her mouth. 

Henry Cleverly

I was born in London in1962. I grew up on Badlake farm on the edge of Exmoor. At school I co-founded a poetry magazine “Enter Rumour”. I came to Norwich and read English and Philosophy at UEA in 1981. Having lived in the woods at Heydon I moved to London where I attended a weekly poetry workshop in Blackheath. I published “Walking Willacome Well” in 1991 (Laundry Press). After travelling around South America I moved back to Norfolk, this time to Little Snoring. In this time I made and sold shell and driftwood mobiles, which were exhibited at Rebecca Hossack’s gallery and read with “Weird of Mouth” at various venues in North Norfolk and the Hull and Ilkley literary festivals. In 2001 I published “Render My Heart” (Laundry Press). After completing an MA in Creative Writing at U.E.A in 2002 I moved back to Exmoor with my partner and our daughter for four years, before returning to Little Snoring, now with twin boys too. I worked as the maintenance man on a dutch barge at Well’s-next-the sea where I lost my little finger to the anchor chain. The boat was called the Albatros (appropriately). Now I am living in Norwich where I work as a gardener and builder, writing away and ready (finally) to bring out my third collection.

Josephine Guilani 

Josephine Giuliani is a self-taught fiction writer and practicing artist. After living in Milan for seven years, attending art school and teaching English, she moved to the UK where she raised her family. Alongside her family life, she obtained a BA (Hons) in History of Art from the University of Cambridge, worked within the NHS, and recently completed an MSc in Psychology. This rich and varied perspective on life informed the themes of art forgery and criminal psychology in her debut thriller-in-progress, Rubens on the Run. Selected for the National Centre for Writing’s TLC Free Reads scheme, her manuscript was highly praised by author Angela Clarke, who placed the draft in the top 1% of submissions received over her fifteen-year career for its fresh, compelling take on the contemporary thriller. 

Mick Parish 

Mick Parish is 74 years old, and learned to read and write aged 60. He is 22 years clean and dry from alcohol and drugs, and while in recovery was encouraged to write. He has since written daily with the help and support of loved ones, and is writing A New Boy in Tottenham – The Little Knuckleduster, a firsthand account of growing up in poverty during the 1950s and 60s. He is an alumna of the National Centre for Writing’s A Life Written programme 2025, and of the 2025-26 TLC Free Reads Scheme.