About Us:
Established in 2016, Oxford Writers’ House Connects, Inspires, and Gives Voice to Oxfordshire’s writing communities.
an inclusive community of writers —
a bridge between Town and Gown —
a portal between shire and multiverse.
Directors
Dr April Elisabeth Pawar
Dr Pawar is the Founder and Director of Oxford Writers’ House. She holds an MA from New York University and a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she taught as a Rothermere American Institute Fellow. She is the former President of the Oxford University Poetry Society and a founder of Oxford’s chapter of English PEN. She publishes both fiction and non-fiction, and is interested in the intersection of literature and philosophy.
Charlee Wedderburn-Bolton
Charlee is a Publishing Director and an English Language and Literature finalist at Oxford University, as well as a poet and spoken word performer. He has performed locally throughout his time at Oxford, and has contributed to creative projects ranging from exhibitions within her own college to a publication for the English Association.
Griffin Gudaitis
Griffin Gudaitis is a Publishing Director and fiction writer whose passion is exploring the human experience through art. He is reading for an MPhil in English Studies (Medieval Period) at Linacre College. His list of publications includes a forthcoming fiction story in The Vanity Papers, a feature in The Isis Magazine, and a nonfiction story about breaking his foot in The Purple Literary Magazine. Outside of creative writing, he loves to travel and lift weights.
Tom Stopford
Tom is an Events Director and a local artist and writer. When not organising events, he is illustrating winning stories for the Peregrine Prize for Young Authors, or working on his forthcoming graphic novel.
Ursula White
Ursula is a Podcasting Director and an English Language and Literature finalist at Oxford University. Whilst at Oxford she has written for The Cherwell and been involved with various creative projects including organising the Somerville College Arts Week (2023). She is fascinated by the world of podcasting and works alongside the other Directors to create educational and entertaining content.
Josiah Shields
Josiah is a Publishing Director and is a second-year Ancient and Modern History student at Oxford University. He enjoys taking on light-hearted writing and editorial projects, with recent examples including contributing satirical articles to the Oxymoron magazine and editing a friend’s book on his droll experiences as a Deliveroo rider during the Covid lockdowns. His broader interests include playing the violin and rowing.
Joy Chang
Joy is a Social Media Director and a first-year English Language and Literature student at the University of Oxford. Her passion is in education, and she loves tutoring when she is not occupied with creative writing, ballroom dancing, and other artistic endeavours.
Steering Committee
Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman
Philip Pullman is the author of several best-selling books, most notably the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Awards for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Prize. In 2013, he was awarded the first Infosys Prize in the Humanities.
Professor Matthew Bevis
Matthew Bevis is a Professor of Literature at Keble College, where he hosts the Oxford the Poets at Keble series. He also runs a monthly poetry reading group at HMP Grendon, Europe's only Therapeutic Community Prison. He has written for The London Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Raritan, Poetry, and other papers and journals.
Professor Dame Hermione Lee
Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.
Dr Mariah Whelan
Mariah Whelan is a British-Irish poet, teacher and interdisciplinary researcher. She is former Director of Oxford Writers’ House. Her debut collection, a novel-in-sonnets was published in 2019. Her work has been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, The Poetry Book Awards, and The Melita Hume Prize. She is also winner of the AM Heath Prize.
Kate Clanchy
Kate Clanchy’s poetry and radio plays have been broadcast by BBC Radio. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian. Her work appeared in The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She has won numerous awards, including the Eric Gregory Award, the Forward Poetry Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award, and the Costa Book Award for First Novel.
Dr Noreen Masud
Noreen Masud is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her research covers all kinds of bases: flatness, spivs, puppets, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours, superstitions. She is interested in twentieth-century literature, Victorian and Romantic literature.
Gaby Sambucceti
Gaby is an Argentine born, UK-based writer. She holds an MA at King’s College London, where she won the Cosmo-Davenport Hines poetry prize in 2022. She is studying Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, and is a founding member of the Oxford Writers’ House. She is the founder and managing director of La Ninfa Eco, working with a team of writers from Europe, the UK, the US and Latin America.
Professor Elleke Boehmer
Elleke is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an internationally acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies.
Sarah Howe
Sarah is a Hong Kong-born British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Dr Sally Bayley
Sally Bayley is a fiction and non-fiction writer who lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford. Most days she swims in the river. Sally is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches academic writing, literature, film and creative writing for the Sarah Lawrence visiting programme at Wadham College, Oxford.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Kiran Millwood-Hargrage is a British poet, playwright and novelist. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kiran is a best-selling author of fiction. She publishes Young Adult and Children’s literature, and has won numerous literary awards.
Theophilus Kwek
Theophilus Kwek has published four collections of poetry, two of which were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. His most recent collection, Moving House, was published by Carcanet in 2020. In 2023, he was the youngest writer and first Singaporean to be awarded the Cikada Prize by the Swedish Institute, for poetry that defends the inviolability of life.
Sir Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets. He is President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.
Jamie McKendrick
Jamie McKendrick writes and teaches in Oxford. He is the author of many award-winning collections of poetry. His translation of Valerio Magrelli's The Embrace: Selected Poems (published in a U.S. bilingual edition as Vanishing Points) won the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Nathan Hamilton
Nathan Hamilton is a poet and publisher. He is Managing Director of UEA Publishing Project, comprising Boiler House Press, Strangers Press, and Egg Box Publishing, and was previously chairman of the board of directors for Inpress, representing over 40 independent UK publishers. He publishes poetry and criticism.
Dr Eleni Philippou
Eleni Philippou works in English Literature and translation. As conveyor of the Oxford Comparative Criticism network, Eleni has hosted numerous international talks and seminars. Her own poetry has been translated into Greek, German and Polish.
Asiyla Radwan
Asiyla is a co-founder of the Oxford Writers' House. She studied Fine Art at Oxford University. Her work has been exhibited around Oxfordshire and featured in the Jericho Review. As a visiting artist and organiser, she has given creative workshops on film and practical design at Nine Worlds, Willowbrook Festival and VidUKon.
Professor Erica McAlpine
Erica McAlpine is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall. Her poetry has appeared in American and British magazines, including the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, Parnassus, Ambit, and Stand. She is also a scholar of 19th and 20th century poetry, and a translator of Horace. She lives in Oxford with her husband and two young children.