I Am A Writer - Meet the Writers

Jack Burrows has been writing, acting and directing theatre for 20 years.  His first play Four Uncertain Kings (2004) launched his theatre company Behind Bars Theatre. Since then, he has gone on to write plays for Mansfield Palace Theatre, and for the last 12 years he has written and directed the community pantomime for Sutton Centre Stage Group and Academy Transformation Trust. Jack was a 2022-23 Associate Artist with New Perspectives.

Lucy Grace is a writer, tutor, editor and workshop leader in a variety of community settings. Her short stories and flash fiction are published in over twenty print and online anthologies. Her debut novel was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and the Mslexia Novel Award. She is currently working on a novel set in a Midlands colliery village after the pits closed down which has been longlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize. In 2022, Lucy was awarded a funded PhD scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is studying at Nottingham Trent University as part of the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

Andrew Graves is a poet, performer and cinephile. He has been featured on Radio 6 Music’s Cerys Matthews Show and BBC Radio 4. His latest titles include Not Dancing with Ingrid Pitt published by Burning Eye Books (2020), and Welcome to the Cheap Seats (2019) a history of working class cinema. Andrew runs film courses and pre-screen introductions at arthouse independent cinemas such as Broadway in Nottingham and Phoenix in Leicester.

Clare Harvey is an award-winning fiction author, published by Simon and Schuster. She has a background in journalism, charity PR, and teaching English learners, and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham. Clare is currently working towards a PhD entitled ‘Co-Authoring With Forgotten Voices’, which looks at the legal, ethical and creative implications of remixing memoirs into new fiction. Alongside her postgraduate research, Clare also runs writing workshops and mentors emerging authors.

Pippa is a Nottingham-based writer. Her poetry, graphic fiction, short fiction and creative non-fiction have been published in a range of anthologies and magazines and she is now writing digital poetry – experimenting with what words can do when they’re not tied to the printed page. She has been facilitating writing workshops in a range of settings – including schools, prisons, universities, libraries, museums and art galleries – for over ten years. Since January 2021 she has been a lead writer on Writing East Midlands’ Beyond the Spectrum project, which provides free online writing workshops and a range of other activities for autistic adults and young people. In the last four years she has been diagnosed with Autism and ADHD.

Anna O’Steele is the bestselling author of seven novels, a playwright and an emerging screenwriter. She is a BBC Writersroom and New Perspectives Associate Alumnus and is currently writing her eighth novel.

Annie Warren is a midlands-based writer, editor, translator and photographer. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, the Evesham Festival of Words, and the UCL Publishers’ Prize. As an editor, Annie created and produced the Rough Guide to LGBTQ+ Friendly Places in Europe (2023), the first queer travel guide of its kind. She is currently a romance editor for Mills & Boon, where she works with a list of amazing authors and can't quite believe that she gets to spend her days reading about rugged highlanders and charismatic billionaires!