Esme Rhodes: Esme Rhodes is an actress featuring herein as Eloise Weaver. She recently graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in History. Recent credits include 'Skeleton Crew' at the Edinburgh Fringe (2024), the Weston Library's 'A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850' (2023), and 'Having the Last Word' (2024).
Judith Bunting: Judith Bunting is a screenwriter, with a background as a writer, director, and producer of award-winning content for TV and VOD.
Writers:
Susan Lee Sontag: Susan Sontag was a writer, literary critic, political activist, essayist and philosopher. A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.
Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.
Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: Born in Lahore in 1947, Mehrotra is the author of seven volumes of poetry – including Nine Enclosures (1976), Distance in Statute Miles (1982), Middle Earth (1984) and The Transfiguring Places (1998) – as well as three of translations, most recently Songs of Kabir (2011). His Collected Poems 1969–2014 is to be published by Penguin Modern Classics. He lives in Allahabad, where he was Professor of English at the university until his retirement in 2012, and Dehra Dun. In his work as an anthologist and translator Mehrotra has done much to bring the work of Indian poets past and present to a wider audience and has been an outspoken critic of the failure of the Indian literary establishment to do more in this field, remarking in an interview with the Times of India that ‘the list of what Indian academics have not done is a long one’. In the 1970s, along with poets Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Arun Kolatkar, Mehrotra founded the Bombay poetry publishing collective Clearing House, in response to a lack of such outlets for Indian poets. He has edited several works on Indian literature including The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), A History of Indian Literature in English (2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (2010). Amit Chaudhuri has said of him: ‘In the staid world of Indian poetry in English […] Mehrotra appeared to be what is today called “cool”’ (Biography from the Poetry Archive).
Dr. April Elisabeth Pawar: April Pawar is the Founder of the Oxford Writers’ House. She graduated from St. Anne’s College, Oxford in 2016 with a DPhil in English Literature. She writes fiction, essays, and poetry.
Tom Stopford: Tom is an Events Director and an Oxford-based artist and writer. When not organising events, he is illustrating winning stories for the Peregrine Prize for Young Authors, or working on his forthcoming graphic novel.
Interviewed Experts:
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. From 2018-2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. In 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1990, Sally was the first child to go to university from the West Sussex Social Services Care system. She believes anyone can learn to write or think well given the right guidance. One reader has described her books as ‘rhapsodies’, which means ‘to stitch a song.’ (Biography from Author Website)
Dr. Luke Young: Luke Young is a writer and scholar of 20th and 21st Century British and American Literature. He is currently working on turning his doctoral thesis – On Liberal Democracy and the Temperaments of the Twentieth-Century Essay – into an academic monograph. He has two academic essays on George Orwell forthcoming: ‘Arithmetic, Love and Emotional Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four’ in The Routledge Companion to George Orwell’; and ‘Orwell’s Confident Non-Fiction’ in George Orwell in Context. Alongside these academic projects, Luke is failing to complete his first novel, Lonely is the Pathetic Youth.
