Wendy Vaizey is a senior lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing. She publishes both prose fiction and literary criticism. She received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and returned to UEA to complete her PhD in Critical and Creative Writing with a thesis entitled Writing the Kristevan Novel: The Role of the Synaesthetic Sea in Banville and Murdoch’s Fictions of Mourning and Loss. Her writing and research focuses on psychoanalysis and interstitial landscapes and histories in English and Irish novels. In 2011 she was awarded a Faber Fellowship. She has recently completed her second novel Fisher Street and is now working on a novel inspired by Iris Murdoch’s life.

Emma Claire Sweeney teaches on City University’s Novel Studio and at New York University in London. Her fiction has won Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund, and Escalator Awards (for which she was nominated by Jill Dawson), and has been shortlisted for several others, including the Asham, Wasafiri, and Fish. She also writes literary features and pieces on disability for publications such as The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, Mslexia, and The Times. She recently published The Memoir and is currently completing a PhD at the OU on literary representations of disability. She has launched Something Rhymed – a website about female literary friendship. Her first novel The Waifs and Strays of Sea View Lodge was inspired by her autistic sister.