SULAIMAN ADDONIA
Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, and his early teens in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He arrived in London as an underage unaccompanied refugee without a word of English and went on to earn an MA in Development Studies from SOAS and a BSc in Economics from UCL. His first novel, The Consequences of Love (Chatto & Windus, 2008), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was translated into more than 20 languages. His second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue (Indigo Press, 2019; Graywolf, 2020), was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards 2021, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, the inaugural African Literary Award from The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, and longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Fiction. Addonia’s essays appear in LitHub, Granta, Freeman’s, The New York Times, De Standaard and Passa Porta. He is a contributor to Tales of Two Planets (Penguin, 2020) and Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Books, 2020). Addonia currently lives in Brussels where he founded the Creative Writing Academy for Refugees & Asylum Seekers and the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival In Exile (AALFIE), selected in 2022 as one of the top 40 literary festivals in the world. In 2021 he was awarded Belgium’s Golden Afro Artistic Award for Literature and in 2022 he was elected as a Fellow of Royal Society of Literature (RSL). Prototype published his third novel, The Seers, in 2024.
PAUL BUCK
Paul Buck has been writing and publishing since the late Sixties. His work is characterised by its sabotaging of the various forms in order to explore their overlaps and differences. Through the Seventies he also edited the seminal magazine Curtains, with its focus on threading French writing from Bataille, Blanchot, Jabès, Faye, Noël, Ronat, Collobert and a score of others into a weave with English and American writers and artists. While editing and translating are still a daily activity – in partnership with Catherine Petit, the Vauxhall&Company series of books at Cabinet Gallery is their responsibility – he also continues to cover new ground: Spread Wide, a fiction generated from his letters with Kathy Acker; Performance, a biography of the Cammell/Roeg film; Lisbon, a cultural view of a city; A Public Intimacy, strip-searching scrapbooks to expose autobiography; Library: a suitable case for treatment, a collection of essays. In recent times he helped Laure Prouvost to write her film Deep See Blue Surrounding You, around which her Venice Biennale pavilion, representing France, was based. Prototype published his novel Along the River Run in 2020, and Test Centre published an experimental pamphlet, To End It All, in 2015.
EMILY CRITCHLEY
Emily Critchley is the author of fourteen poetry collections including Home (Prototype, 2021), alphabet poem: for kids! (Prototype, 2020), Arrangements (Shearsman Books, 2019) and Ten Thousand Things (Boiler House Press, 2018). She is the editor of Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK(Reality Street, 2016) and co-editor of #MeToo: A Poetry Collective (Chicago Review, Summer 2018). Critchley is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich. She lives with her daughter in London.
OLI HAZZARD
Oli Hazzard is the author of four books of poems, Between Two Windows (Carcanet, 2012), Blotter (Carcanet, 2018), Progress: Real and Imagined (SPAM Press, 2020), and Sleepers Awake (Carcanet, 2024) and a book of literary criticism, John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange: The Minor Eras (Oxford University Press, 2018). His debut novel, Lorem Ipsum, was published by Prototype in 2021. He lives in Glasgow, and teaches at the University of St Andrews.
BHANU KAPIL
Bhanu Kapil was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. Her most recent book, How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. The recipient of a Windham- Campbell Prize and a Cholmondeley Award, both for poetry, Kapil is the author of six full-length collections. Prototype published the first UK edition of her seminal hybrid text, Incubation: a space for monsters in 2023. For twenty years, she taught creative writing, performance art and contemplative practice at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Currently, she is based in Cambridge as a Fellow of Churchill College. She also teaches for the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, as part of a practice- based Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Leadership and Creativity for Sustainability.
HELEN MARTEN
Helen Marten is an artist based in London. She studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art, University of Oxford and Central St. Martins, London. In recent years she has presented solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London; Fridericianum, Kassel; CCS Bard, Hessel Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Zürich and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among others. She was included in the 55th and 56th International Venice Biennales and in 2016 won both the Turner Prize and the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. Marten’s work can be found in public collections including Tate Collection, London; Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Marten’s artwork is collected in three recent monographs and she works with Sadie Coles HQ, London, Greene Naftali, NYC, and König Galerie, Berlin. Prototype published her debut novel, The Boiled in Between, in 2020.
OTIS MENSAH
Otis Mensah (recipient of a Jerwood Arts Live Work Fund & Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice grant) is a writer and musician exploring the intersection of poetry and experimental music(s). Taking influence from the rhythmic and expressive freedom of Jazz, Otis’s work uses aesthetic language as an instrument to solo through themes of identity and existence. Since being appointed Sheffield’s first Poet Laureate in 2018, Otis has shared stages with the likes of Moor Mother, Benjamin Zephaniah and Little Simz. Prototype published his debut collection, Safe Metamorphosis, in 2020, now in its 2nd printing.
ALAN ROSSI
Alan Rossi’s fiction has appeared in Granta, The Missouri Review, The New England Review, and many other journals. His novella Did You Really Just Say That To Me? was awarded the third annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. His fiction has also won a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize. His first novel, Mountain Road, Late at Night, was published by Picador in 2020. Prototype published Rossi’s novel Our Last Year in 2022.
LEONIE RUSHFORTH
Leonie Rushforth was born in Ely in 1956. She lives in east London. Deltas, her first full collection of poems, was published by Prototype in 2022 and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection.
AMANDA THOMSON
Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer. Originally trained as a printmaker, her interdisciplinary work is often about notions of home, movements, migrations, landscapes and the natural world and how places come to be made. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her writing has appeared in The Willowherb Review, Gutter and the anthologies Antlers of Water, Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie, and The Wild Isles: An Anthology of the Best British and Irish nature writing edited by Patrick Barkham. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, is published by Saraband Books; and a collaboration with Elizabeth Reeder, microbursts, a collection of lyric and intermedial essays, is published by Prototype
AHREN WARNER
Ahren Warner has published five books of poetry, most recently I’m totally killing your vibes (Bloodaxe, 2021) and The sea is spread and cleaved and furled (Prototype, 2020). His photography, film and installed works have been exhibited and screened at galleries and institutions including TJ Boulting (London), South London Gallery, The Centre for Digital Arts (Mexico City), Tube Gallery (Palma), Saatchi Gallery (London), Nikola Tesla Museum (Zagreb) and British Council (Athens). His work has appeared in the MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery Documents in Contemporary Art series, The Guardian and on BBC Radio, as well as being published internationally in journals and magazines. He has also received awards from organisations including The Arts Foundation, Royal Society of Literature and Society of Authors. I will pay to make it bigger (Prototype, 2024) is his first novella, and his first photobook.
KATE ZAMBRENO
Kate Zambreno is the author of ten books, most recently the novel Drifts (Riverhead), a study of Hervé Guibert, To Write As If Already Dead (Columbia University Press), and The Light Room, a meditation on art and care (Riverhead). Tone, a collaborative study with the writer and scholar Sofia Samatar, under The Committee to Investigate Atmosphere, was recently published by Columbia University Press. Their fiction and reports have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, VQR, Astra, BOMB, and more. Animal Stories is forthcoming through the Undelivered Lectures series at Transit Books in Fall 2025. They are at work on a trilogy on interiors and precarity, Realisms, Foam and Inspection. UK editions of Book of Mutter and Appendix Project are forthcoming from Prototype.
ASTRID ALBEN
Astrid Alben is a poet, editor and translator. She is the author of Ai! Ai! Pianissimo, Plainspeak (Prototype), Little Dead Rabibit (Prototype). Her translation of Anne Vegter’s Eiland berg gletsjer/Island mountain glacier received an English PEN Translates award and was published by Prototype in 2022. She has been described as ‘a new and original voice in English poetry, serious and uncompromising’ (R. V. Bailey). Her poems have been translated into many languages including Chinese, Maltese, Slovenian and Romanian and she has appeared at Literary Festivals throughout Europe. Astrid is the co-founder and artistic director of the arts and sciences initiative PARS. She has curated and edited the Findings on… series published by Lars Müller Publishers and curated site-specific events that are a mixture of theatre, art installation and scientific experiment. Astrid has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship, Rijksakademie Fellowship, Hosking Houses Fellowship, Arts Council Grant and is a FRSA.
DAN BURT
Dan Burt was born in 1942 in South Philadelphia and went to Philadelphia public schools and a local commuter college, LaSalle. He read English at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, and in 1969 graduated from Yale Law School. He has practised commercial, government and public-interest law in the United States, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia; has been a businessman; and, since 2001, is an Honorary Fellow of St. John’s. Carcanet Press published his first poetry collection, Searched For Text, in 2008 and his fourth, Salvage at Twilight, in 2019. Marlborough Graphics/Lintott Press brought out a poetry and photography collaboration with Paul Hodgson (2010), and You Think It Strange, his brief childhood memoir, appeared in the United Kingdom and the United States (2014, 2015). UK and US newspapers, periodicals and anthologies have featured his poetry and prose – The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The New Statesman, Commonweal, TLS, Granta, PN Review and Clutag Press, among others – as has the BBC and Poetry Archive. His memoir, Every Wrong Direction, was published in the US by Rutgers University Press and by Carcanet Press in the UK in 2022 and Prototype published his pamphlet A History in the same year. He lives and writes in London, Cambridge and Schooner Head, Maine.
DANIELLE DUTTON
Danielle Dutton is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL, the prose collection Attempts at a Life, the illustrated nonfiction chapbook A Picture Held Us Captive, and she wrote the text interpolations for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, Harper’s, BOMB, and NOON. Dutton teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is cofounder and editor of the award-winning feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. Born and raised in California, she has lived on the (former) prairie now for roughly twenty years. Her hybrid literary collection Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is published by Prototype.
HASIB HOURANI
Hasib Hourani, born in Bahrain in 1996, is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator who lives in so-called Australia. He is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme, and his 2021 essay ‘when we blink’ appears in the anthology Against Disappearance. Hourani was awarded The Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund in 2022 and has been a fellow at the Varuna National Writers House in 2021 and 2022. Prototype published Hourani’s debut collection, rock flight, in 2024 .
SASJA JANSSEN
Sasja Janssen is a poet and novelist based in Amsterdam. Her first publications were two novels but since her father’s death she has written mainly poetry. Her poems feature the body in many shapes, from tool to target, from weapon to wound. Virgula (2021) was nominated for five Dutch prizes and awarded the prestigious Awater Poetry Prize, and was published by Prototype in an English translation by Michele Hutchison in 2024. Putting On My Species (2014) was her first collection to be translated into English and was published by Shearsman in 2020. Janssen has performed nationally and internationally, including at festivals in Nicaragua, Medellín, Mexico and Buenos Aires. The poet and critic Piet Gerbrandy wrote of her work, ‘The poet tries desperately to grasp something of the insane world we find ourselves in and in which we have to simply make do, with totally inadequate means.’
CALEB KLACES
Caleb Klaces is the author of the novel Fatherhood (Prototype, 2019), which was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the poetry collections Away From Me (Prototype, 2021) and Bottled Air (2013), which won the Melita Hume Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, and two chapbooks, All Safe All Well (2011) and Modern Version (2018). He is Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at York St John University, and runs the York Centre for Writing Poetry Series.
LILA MATSUMOTO
Lila Matsumoto is the author of Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water, a Poetry Society Recommendation published by Prototype in 2021. Lila’s other publications include the poetry collection Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018) and the chapbooks Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2016) and Allegories from my Kitchen (Sad Press, 2015). She teaches poetry and creative-critical writing at the University of Nottingham and plays in the bands Food People and Cloth. Her website is: lilamatsumoto.com
LUCY MERCER
Lucy Mercer’s debut poetry collection Emblem (Prototype, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was featured on BBC Radio 3. Her poems have been published in magazines such as Poetry Review, Poetry London and The White Review, and essays in Art Review, Granta and others. She is currently a is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Exeter.
CARMEN PELLEGRINO
Carmen Pellegrino is an Italian historian and writer. An eclectic scholar, she has focused her research on collective movements of dissidence, racism, social exclusion and the conditions of exploitation of migrants (including the essay ‘The Hours of my Day’, published in the anthology Qui and Fatigue: Stories, Tales and Reportage from the World of Work, 2010, winner of the Reportage Napoli Monitor award). Co-author of various collective works, in 2011 she co-edited with C. Zagaria the volume Not a Country for Women: Stories of Extraordinary Normality, in which she published an essay on Matilde Sorrentino. Among her most recent central themes of investigation is the study of uninhabited villages and the ruins of ancient settlements, through which she laid the foundations for a science of abandonment as a form of recovering awareness of the historical experience of places. In addition to The Earth is Falling (Cade la terra, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Campiello Prize, Pellegrino is the author of the novels If I Came Back This Evening Next (Se mi tornassi questa sera accanto, 2017) and The Happiness of Others (La felicità degli altri, 2021, also shortlisted for the Campiello prize).
LAVINIA SINGER
Lavinia Singer is the author of the pamphlet Ornaments: A Handbook (If a Leaf Falls/Glyph Press, 2020) and co-editor of Try To Be Better (Prototype, 2019), a creative-critical engagement with the work of W. S. Graham. Artifice, her first full collection of poetry, was published by Prototype in 2023.
STEPHEN WATTS
Stephen Watts was born in 1952. His father was from Stoke-on-Trent and his mother’s family from villages high in the Italian & Swiss Alps. He spent very vital time – in place of university – in northern Scotland, especially the island of North Uist, but since 1977 has lived mainly in the richly multilingual communities of the Whitechapel area of East London. Geographies & location (as also their negative theologies) are urgent to his life & his work. Recent books include Ancient Sunlight (Enitharmon, 2014; repr. 2020) & Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds (Test Centre, 2016; Prototype, 2020) & a b/w 16mm 70-minute experimental film The Republics was made from the latter by Huw Wahl in 2019. Journeys Across Breath: Poems 1975–2005 (Prototype, 2022) gathers together much of his work from the years 1975 to 2005, published & unpublished, & a second volume, including further early & later work, is planned to follow.
CHLOE ARIDJIS
Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican writer based in London. She is the author of three novels, Book of Clouds, which won the Prix du Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & a Portrait Gallery is published by our House Sparrow Press imprint. Chloe has written for various art journals and was guest curator of the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 and the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers Award for 2020. Chloe is a founding member of XR Writers Rebel, a group of writers who focus on addressing biodiversity loss and the climate emergency: www.writersrebel.com.
SASCHA AURORA AKHTAR
Sascha Aurora Akhtar has published seven collections of poetry. Her first short story collection, Of Necessity And Wanting, was shortlisted for the UBL Prize for Literary Excellence in 2023. Akhtar translated Belles-Lettres: Writings of Hijab Imtiaz Ali, the first translation of Ali’s ‘Adab-e-Zareen’, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Belles-Lettres received an Honourable Mention for the 2024 A.K. Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. A third- generation psychic in the Lancashire lineage, Akhtar studied in Pakistan and at Bennington College, Vermont, and University of Amherst, Massachusetts. Akhtar performs internationally, with recent highlights including the Emirates Festival of Literature, Poetry Wales and Rotterdam Poetry Festival. Prototype published a reissue of her seminal debut collection, The Grimoire of Grimalkin, in 2024.
AMY ARNOLD
Amy Arnold lives in Cumbria. She has degrees in Music and Psychology, and studied postgraduate Neuropsychology at Birmingham University. She’s worked as a university lecturer, teacher and swede packer. Her debut novel, Slip of a Fish, won the 2018 Northern Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize. Lori & Joe, published by Prototype, was shortlisted for the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize.
SAM BUCHAN-WATTS
Sam Buchan-Watts is the author of Faber New Poets 15 and co-editor, with Lavinia Singer, of Try To Be Better(Prototype, 2019), a creative-critical engagement with W. S. Graham. He is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ Award for Poetry (2019). In 2018 he undertook a fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art and he is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University.
JEN CALLEJA
Jen Calleja is a poet, short story writer and essayist who has been widely published, including in The White Review, The London Magazine, and Best British Short Stories (Salt). She was awarded an Authors’ Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors to work on Vehicle, and was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize for an excerpt from the novel. She was also longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experimentation in Text. Test Centre published her debut poetry collection Serious Justice in 2016. Prototype published her short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For in 2020 and her verse novel Vehicle in 2023. She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize as a literary translator from German into English and was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library.Calleja played and toured in the DIY punk bands Sauna Youth, Feature, Monotony, Gold Foil and Mind Jail spanning a period of over a decade as both a drummer and a vocalist.
LUCIE ELVEN
Lucie Elven has written for publications including the London Review of Books, Granta and NOON. The Weak Spot is her first book. She lives in London.
YURI FELSEN
Yuri Felsen (1894–1943) was the pseudonym of Nikolai Freudenstein. Born in St Petersburg in 1894, he emigrated in the wake of the Russian Revolution, first to Riga and then to Berlin, before finally settling in Paris in 1923. In France, he became one of the leading writers of his generation, alongside the likes of Vladimir Nabokov; influenced by the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, his writing stood at the forefront of aesthetic and philosophical currents in European literature. Following the German occupation of France at the height of his career, Felsen tried to escape to Switzerland; however, he was caught, arrested and interned in Drancy concentration camp. He was deported in 1943 and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Prototype published Deceit in its first English translation, by Bryan Karetnyk, in 2022.
DEREK JARMAN
Derek Jarman (1942–1994) is one of the most influential figures in 20th century British culture. Best known as an iconoclastic filmmaker and polemical gay activist who channelled unparalleled energy into painting, writing, gardening and all manner of cultural activity, he was one of the primary catalysts for a generation of artists and filmmakers whose work is only now being fully recognised for its dark, subversive imagination and fluidity across media. Amongst his films, Jarman is particularly recognised for Jubilee (1977), arguably the first punk movie, Caravaggio (1986), and Blue (1993), a moving memoir about his degeneration from AIDS. Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping was published by our House Sparrow imprint in 2022.
MICHAEL KINDELLAN
Michael Kindellan is a Canadian-born poet and scholar. He lives in Berlin with partner Julia and their daughters Greta and Agnes. Prototype published his collaborative poetry collection with Emily Critchley, alphabet poem: for kids!, in 2020.
ROBERT HERBERT MCCLEAN
Robert Herbert McClean, an Irish writer and audio-visual artist, was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Futures Awards Poetry Fellowship, 2019. His debut book, Pangs!, was published by Test Centre in 2015, and Prototype published his experimental, interdisciplinary work Songs for Ireland in 2020. His most recent publication, Skrubolz Garbillkore was commissioned and edited by Maria Fusco as part of the Dialecty series, published by Book Works, in association with The Common Guild, in 2018.
HELEN PALMER
Helen Palmer is a writer from Blackpool. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). She is a 2023 Interdisciplinary Resident at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Virginia, USA. She currently lives in Vienna. Pleasure Beach, published by Prototype in 2023, is her first novel.
ELIZABETH REEDER
Elizabeth Reeder, originally from Chicago, now lives in Scotland. She writes fiction, narrative non-fiction and hybrid work that creates spaces between forms, subjects and disciplines. Her work explores identity, family, illness and grief, creativity and landscapes. She has published two previous novels, Ramshackle and Fremont, and her latest novel, An Archive of Happiness, was published by Penned in the Margins in September 2020. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. Her website is: elizabethkreeder.com. Prototype published microbursts, a hybrid collaborative book with Amanda Thomson, in 2021.
ANNE VEGTER
Anne Vegter is the author of numerous poetry collections, children’s books, theatre monologues and erotic stories. Her first collection of poems, Het Veerde (It Bounce), was published in 1991, followed in 1994 by Ongekuiste versies (Filth), a book of erotic tales. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Awater Poetry Prize in 2011. Vegter became the first woman to be named Poet Laureate of the Netherlands in 2013 and is Rotterdam’s city poet for 2021–22. Her most recent collection, Big Data, was published in 2020 and awarded the Ida Gerhardt Poëzieprijs. Prototype published Astrid Alben’s translation of Island mountain glacier in 2022, which was the recipient of an English PEN Translates award.
