Our anthology writers

As promised we will be posting short biographies of the writers whose work has been selected to appear in Words And Women’s fourth anthology alongside our national winning story The Wife by Deborah Arnander and our regional winning piece Suite For My Father by Melissa Fu. If you want to find out more about Deborah and Melissa then please see our post dated 09/01/17.

More biographies will be posted next week. Congratulations to all of the following writers for their success.

Jamilah Ahmed grew up in the Middle East and is half Arab, half Irish. She has lived in London since graduating from University. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths, where her work examined the sociological language used to describe the female embodied self. Jamilah has worked in publishing as a Commissioning Editor in the social sciences and more recently as a freelance editor and literary agent. Her writing career began with an OU online creative writing course while on maternity leave. Following a mentorship with GoldDust, her work has been long-listed by Mslexia & WriteIdea. Her novel Recognising Strangers won the 2016 SI Leeds Literary Prize: Reader’s Choice Award. Jamilah’s non-fiction piece Leaving The Home That Made Me will feature in Words And Women: Four.

Kate Harmond Allan lives near Brighton with her husband Jay and two cats.

Kate has published poetry, short stories, plays and an academic series on the history of medicine.

She has participated in Brighton and Edinburgh Fringe festivals and more recently edited compilations of art and poetry.

Kate loves sunshine, red wine and Strictly!

Her short memoir Sunday Tea will feature in Words And Women: Four.  Kate was inspired to write it while living with her mother's dementia for the last five years, and realising the importance of preserving memories.

Margaret Callaghan is a writer and researcher living in Glasgow. She has been shortlisted for the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and Next Chapter Award as well as Flash 500 first novel award.  She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. Recently she worked with the Social Bite charity to write a recipe book to raise funds for the homeless and has a guide book on Barcelona coming out with Freight books in the Spring.  She is currently working on her first novel The List of Things to Do and Be. 

Margaret’s story Pull Of Distance will be published in the anthology.

Tricia Cresswell was born in January 1957 in Leeds and now lives with her husband near the beautiful Northumberland coast.  She is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University.  Her professional background is in public health medicine; she has recently retired after 36 years working for the NHS and latterly Public Health England and carries values in relation to the fundamental principles of social justice and women’s reproductive rights into her prose writing.  More widely she is particularly interested in the concepts of place and time in fiction and the balance between internal consistency in relation to place and the creative bending of time.   She has a lifelong interest in both SF and historical fiction. Her current literary demigods are Iain (M) Banks, Hilary Mantel, Amitav Ghosh and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Tricia's story Future Perfect will be published in the anthology.