About Us:
Established in 2016, Oxford Writers’ House connects, inspires, and gives voice to Oxfordshire’s writing communities. We are:
an inclusive community of writers —
a bridge between Town and Gown —
a portal between shire and multiverse.
Directors
Dr April Elisabeth Pawar
Dr Pawar is the Founder and Director of Oxford Writers’ House. She holds an MA from New York University and a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she taught as a Rothermere American Institute Fellow. She is the former President of the Oxford University Poetry Society and a founder of Oxford’s chapter of English PEN. Selected pieces of her writing can be found on her personal website: aprilpawar.co.uk
Ashley Duraiswamy
Ashley Duraiswamy is the Publishing Director of the Oxford Writers' House. She is pursuing an MSt in Victorian literature at Oxford University and will embark on her DPhil in the fall. While studying creative writing at Yale, she read for The Yale Review and worked for a children’s editorial team at Simon & Schuster. Currently, she is working on a children’s book of her own.
Sasha Darvas
Sasha Darvas is the Events Director of the Oxford Writers' House. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University, where she also founded a feminist magazine, and was the President of Cambridge's oldest literary society. She is currently undertaking a Master's degree in Creative Writing at Oxford University. Most recently she has been published in the Faber Academy Anthology, and is working on her debut novel.
Tom Stopford
Tom is an Arts Fellow and a local artist and writer. He supports outreach efforts in the writing communities across Oxford, and is illustrating winning stories for the Peregrine Prize for Young Authors. He is also working on a forthcoming graphic novel.
Anna Terry
Anna Terry is the Social Media Director of the Oxford Writers’ House and an MSt student in Victorian literature at the University of Oxford. She earned her BA in English from Vassar College and spent a year abroad as a visiting student at Hertford College, Oxford. A fiction writer, classical musician, and visual artist, she is drawn to creative work that reimagines genre and form.
Isabel Galwey
Isabel Galwey is a writer, translator, and researcher based in Oxford, UK. She is the Podcasting Fellow at the Oxford Writers’ House. In 2025 Isabel is embarking on her DPhil in Chinese Studies; her research focuses on disrupted boundaries between the human and non-human in contemporary Chinese literature and film. Earlier this year, her novel-in-progress One for Sorrow was longlisted for the Edinburgh Young Adult Novel Award, and in 2024 she wrapped her debut feature as a screenwriter, Washed Up. Isabel loves wild swimming, long distance running, gardening, and doodling in the margins of her notes.
Nancy Gittus
Nancy Gittus is Oxford Writers’ House Podcasting Director. She is currently in her second year at Hertford College reading History and French, but she enjoys spending her free time writing creatively. Most recently, she won Oxford University Drama Society’s New Writing Festival Prompted Scene Category and regularly contributes to The Oxford Blue’s global affairs section. She has also been working on her first full length novel.
Br. John Baptist Santa Ana, OSB
John Baptist is the Events Fellow at the Oxford Writers’ House. He is a Benedictine monk of St. Andrew’s Abbey. He holds degrees from Notre Dame, the Dominican House of Studies, Biola, and is currently pursuing a DPhil in Theology and Religion at Worcester. He has written for academic publishers but finds more enjoyment in writing stories for children and young adults.
Steering Committee
Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman
Philip Pullman is the author of several best-selling books, most notably the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Awards for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Prize. In 2013, he was awarded the first Infosys Prize in the Humanities.
Professor Matthew Bevis
Matthew Bevis is a Professor of Literature at Keble College, where he hosts the Oxford the Poets at Keble series. He also runs a monthly poetry reading group at HMP Grendon, Europe's only Therapeutic Community Prison. He has written for The London Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Raritan, Poetry, and other papers and journals.
Professor Carolyne Larrington
Carolyne Larrington is Emerita Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford. Her research interests span Old Icelandic literature, myth and legend, emotions in medieval literature, folklore and myth, and contemporary medievalism. Her trade books include The Land of the Green Man; Winter is Coming and All Men Must Die (both on Game of Thrones); The Norse Myths and The Norse Myths that Shape the Way We Think. Her next book will be about trolls; she is currently writing a book on women and myth, scheduled for publication in 2027.
Dr Mariah Whelan
Mariah Whelan is a British-Irish poet, teacher and interdisciplinary researcher. She was the 2017-2019 Director of Oxford Writers’ House. Her debut collection, a novel-in-sonnets was published in 2019. Her work has been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, The Poetry Book Awards, and The Melita Hume Prize. She is also winner of the AM Heath Prize.
Allie Holtom
Allie Holtom was the Oxford Writers’ House Events Director from 2024-2026. She graduated from the University of Oxford in 2025 after reading English Language and Literature at Somerville College. Allie now works in Public Relations in the books, arts and culture space and continues to love all things literary events. She is particularly drawn to anything Gothic or fantastical, and enjoys writing about fantasy worlds of her own.
Kate Clanchy
Kate Clanchy’s poetry and radio plays have been broadcast by BBC Radio. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian. Her work appeared in The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She has won numerous awards, including the Eric Gregory Award and the Forward Poetry Prize.
Gaby Sambucceti
Gaby is an Argentine born, UK-based writer. She holds an MA at King’s College London, where she won the Cosmo-Davenport Hines poetry prize in 2022. She is studying Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, and is a founding member of the Oxford Writers’ House. She is the founder and managing director of La Ninfa Eco, working with a team of writers from Europe, the UK, the US and Latin America.
Professor Elleke Boehmer
Elleke is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an internationally acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies.
Sarah Howe
Sarah is a Hong Kong-born British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Dr Sally Bayley
Sally Bayley is a fiction and non-fiction writer who lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford. Most days she swims in the river. Sally is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches academic writing, literature, film and creative writing for the Sarah Lawrence visiting programme at Wadham College, Oxford.
Theophilus Kwek
Theophilus Kwek has published four collections of poetry, two of which were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. His most recent collection, Moving House, was published by Carcanet in 2020. In 2023, he was the youngest writer and first Singaporean to be awarded the Cikada Prize by the Swedish Institute, for poetry that defends the inviolability of life.
Griffin Gudaitis
Griffin Gudaitis is a coming-of-age fiction writer. He was the 2025-26 Director of the Oxford Writers' House. He holds an MPhil in English Studies (Medieval) from the University of Oxford, where he was shortlisted for the Oxford Review of Books Short Fiction Prize and twice for the Oxford-BNU Creative Writing Award. His fiction appears in New Nottingham Journal, Euphony Journal, and the Vanity Papers.
Sir Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets. He is President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.
Jamie McKendrick
Jamie McKendrick writes and teaches in Oxford. He is the author of many award-winning collections of poetry. His translation of Valerio Magrelli's The Embrace: Selected Poems (published in a U.S. bilingual edition as Vanishing Points) won the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Nathan Hamilton
Nathan Hamilton is a poet and publisher. He is Managing Director of UEA Publishing Project, comprising Boiler House Press, Strangers Press, and Egg Box Publishing, and was previously chairman of the board of directors for Inpress, representing over 40 independent UK publishers. He publishes poetry and criticism.
Dr Eleni Philippou
Eleni Philippou works in English Literature and translation. As conveyor of the Oxford Comparative Criticism network, Eleni has hosted numerous international talks and seminars. Her own poetry has been translated into Greek, German and Polish.
Asiyla Radwan
Asiyla is a co-founder of the Oxford Writers' House. She studied Fine Art at Oxford University. Her work has been exhibited and featured in the Jericho Review. As a visiting artist and organiser, she has given creative workshops on film and practical design at Nine Worlds, Willowbrook Festival and VidUKon.
Professor Erica McAlpine
Erica McAlpine is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall. Her poetry has appeared in American and British magazines, including the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, Parnassus, Ambit, and Stand. She is also a scholar of 19th and 20th century poetry, and a translator of Horace. She lives in Oxford with her husband and two young children.