Jon Mycroft is a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, and holds a PhD in creative writing and short story pedagogy. He has taught creative writing at Ruskin College Oxford, the University of Birmingham and the University of Warwick, and founded Milverton Writers back in 2016. His academic speciality is short fiction, but he also covers areas as diverse as post-war dystopian fiction, the history of games and competition, modernist art, digital philosophies, and visual methodologies. As well as teaching for fifteen years, Jon is also a fiction editor, working closely with writers to develop their novels to a professional standard. You can find him at www.jonmycroft.com.

Tanya Pengelly is a literary speculative fiction writer based in Warwickshire, England. She holds a PhD in creative writing and the narratology of friendship from the University of Birmingham, and specialises in writing fiction with an emphasis on landscape and psychological realism. She was a finalist in the 2024 Driftwood Press Short Story competition, and her published work includes a story in an upcoming anthology from Comma Press and a short radio play for BBC Radio 4. She was chair of the board for Beyond the Border Storytelling Festival in Wales until 2023, and has been leading Milverton Writers since 2019. You can find her at www.tanyapengelly.com.

Raef Boylan is a Coventry-based writer who experiments. He is the Lead Editor of Here Comes Everyone, a Coventry-based, bi-annual literary magazine of poetry, fiction, articles and artwork. published by Silhouette Press. He organises Fire & Dust (Coventry’s monthly poetry open mic), and is a previous winner of the CU Short Story Award and Frederick Holland Poetry Collection Award, and has been shortlisted for The Big Issue Short Fiction Award. He recently headlined at Positive Images Festival and Earlsdon Fringe Festival, and his spoken word was commissioned for Theatre Absolute’s ensemble production Sphere. 

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Sophie Petrie is a writer and poet from Devon, England, with an interest in southern gothic, fantasy and Norse mythology. She has an MA in Writing from Warwick University and her work has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Reflex Fiction, Here Comes Everyone, and Odes To The Ash Tree. Most recently, Sophie was shortlisted for the Repton Skald Poetry Competition, and was awarded the Local Writer's Prize in the Parracombe Writers Prize. When not writing, she runs an axe throwing business in North Devon.

Brian Sigmon is a space adventure daydreamer who decided to start writing his stories down. He loves to read and write fast-paced, entertaining sci-fi that grips you from the first page and doesn’t let up. Brian has a Ph.D. in theology from Marquette University, and serves on the advisory board of AI and Faith, a group dedicated to exploring the intersection of science, technology, and spirituality. Brian is a book editor, woodworker, sports fan, armchair futurist, and half-decent kids soccer coach. He lives with his wife Amy and their three children in Nashville, Tennessee. Check out Brian's books at www.briansigmon.com.

Pete Waterhouse began telling tales in childhood and hasn’t stopped. What some dismissed as daydreaming definitely wasn’t just being lazy. A degree in Physics convinced him that, while he found science fascinating, he’d make a really rubbish scientist. Making stuff up was just so much more fun than having to be, well, factual. Luckily, he stumbled into a job in academic publishing that allowed him to read about scientific progress, but without having to do all the hard work. He became editor of several journals and is now a freelance writer, copyeditor and proofreader. He has always written short stories to entertain friends and family, but when one story ended up being the length of a novel, he decided it was time to take things seriously and signed up for various courses, including at West Dean College and Warwick University, where he received an MA in Writing. He’s still making stuff up.