Meet The Authors
Whispering Walls
Choman Hardi
Choman Hardi is a multi award-winning author of critically-acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation.
Since 2010, poems from Choman's debut English collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004) have been studied by secondary school students as part of the English GCSE curriculum in the UK.
Choman's second collection, Considering the Women (Bloodaxe, 2015), was given a recommendation by the Poetry Book Society, and shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. It was also translated into French in 2020. A selection of Choman's poems was published in Italian in 2017.
Read more about Choman Hardi here.
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Past Participle
Jane Labous
Jane Labous is a multi award-winning author, journalist and filmmaker writing the human and human rights stories of our time.
Jane read English & French at Jesus College, Oxford, before spending nearly two decades as a journalist reporting from the frontlines for international press and INGOs, most often out of Senegal, West Africa, while also developing her creative art as a writer and novelist.
Jane's debut novel, The Chameleon Girl, is published in Nigeria by Lagos-based publisher, Farafina Books, and available on Amazon. Jane's fiction has been longlisted for prizes including the Bath Novel Prize 2022 and the Santa Fé Writers Project Literary Award 2022.
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As a devoted single parent, Jane often writes stories and characters to honour her wonderful daughter, who is half-Senegalese.
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Read more about Jane Labous here.
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Inner Core
Miki Lentin
Miki Lentin took up writing while travelling the world with his family a few years ago. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck in 2020, and was a finalist in the 2020 Irish Novel Fair for his first book, Winter Sun.
Miki has been placed highly in competitions including the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize, Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Award, and Leicester Writes. Miki has been published in Litro, Storgy, Story Radio, and MIR, among others.
In 2022, Miki published a collection of short stories with Afsana Press, called Inner Core, documenting death, anxiety, masculinity, family and children and social good. Critics called it 'consistently enthralling... funny, moving and disturbing in equal measure'.
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Miki volunteers with refugee charity Breaking Barriers and with foodKIND in Greece, and dreams of one day running a café again.
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The Good, the Bad and the Gringo
Kae Bahar
Kae Bahar is a writer and filmmaker. He grew up in Kurdistan under the regime of Saddam Hussein and was arrested and tortured by the secret police at the age of fourteen. With his family’s help, he managed to escape to Italy to avoid a second arrest and possible death.
Once in Europe, he worked as an actor and produced films for major broadcasters. What kept Kae’s hope alive was storytelling and watching films. Most of his films have won multiple awards. The Good, the Bad, and the Gringo is his first novel.
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The Glass Wall
Goran Baba Ali
Goran Baba Ali has written and published various literary and journalistic works in Kurdish, Dutch and English.
The Glass Wall is Goran's debut novel in the English language. As an ex-refugee, originally from Iraqi Kurdistan, Goran has personally experienced some of the protagonist’s hardships in this novel, including a few weeks living in a desert.
Goran left Iraq in 1994, and has since lived in several countries. He studied sociology in Amsterdam, and in 2019, he completed an MA in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London.