Nikesh Shukla 

Nikesh Shukla is a novelist and screenwriter, who wrote a Spider-Man comic book miniseries for Marvel as well as numerous television projects. Most recently, he released his first children’s book, called The Council Of Good Friends. Nikesh wrote the award-winning short film, Two Dosas, a Channel 4 Comedy Lab called Kabadasses and the award-winning short film, The Great Identity Swindle, and has worked in numerous writer’s rooms both in the UK and US for HBO, Prime, BBC, Sky, and Apple. Nikesh is a fellow of the Sundance Institute and the Royal Society of Literature. Nikesh is a columnist for the Bristol Cable.  

He is the author of Coconut Unlimited (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award), Meatspace and the critically acclaimed The One Who Wrote Destiny. Nikesh is the editor of the bestselling essay collection, The Good Immigrant, which won the reader’s choice at the Books Are My Bag Awards. He co-edited The Good Immigrant USA with Chimene Suleyman. He is the author of three YA novels, Run, Riot (shortlisted for a National Book Award), The Boxer (longlisted for the Carnegie Medal) and Stand Up. Nikesh was one of Time Magazine’s cultural leaders, Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Global Thinkers and The Bookseller’s 100 most influential people in publishing in 2016 and in 2017. He is the co-founder of The Good Literary Agency. Nikesh’s memoir, Brown Baby: A Memoir Of Race, Family And Home was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. He has also written a book on writing called Your Story Matters. Nikesh teaches creative writing for Faber Academy.  

Preti Taneja

Preti Taneja’s novel, We That Are Young, won the Desmond Elliott Prize for the UK’s finest literary debut in 2018, and was listed for awards including the Folio Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski, Europe’s premier award for a work of world literature.

Her second book is Aftermath, a lament on the language of prison, terror, trauma and grief; it won the Gordon Burn Prize 2022 for ‘literature that is fearless in ambition and execution,’ and was a New Statesman and a New Yorker Book of the Year. Her work is available in English and translation around the world. She is the co-writer of the short film, the man who met himself, nominated for the short film Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival, and winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in languages and literatures. 

Preti lives in Newcastle, and is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University and Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.