The Team
Steve Dearden
Director
Steve ensures everything runs smoothly while providing some one-to-one support and producing the Squad’s creative adventures. He is a published prose writer and a producer of his own projects and for others. He works with a range of cultural clients on project, business and organisational development. Steve’s a Visiting Academic at Manchester Metropolitan University and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Emma Adams
Core Team
Emma is a playwright, screenwriter and dramaturge from Bradford. Her writing ranges between dark political satire for adults and adventure comedy for children. She’s written plays to be performed in houses, swimming pools and graveyards (as well as on stages). Emma has worked with Red Ladder, Slung Low, Chris Goode, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Theatre 503, Freedom Studios, Ovalhouse and Paines Plough. Three of her plays have toured nationally and two (Ugly and Animals) are published by Oberon books. (Photo credit: Lizzie Coombes)
Katie Hale
Core Team
Based in Cumbria, Katie Hale is the author of two novels: My Name is Monster and The Edge of Solitude: a New Scientist Book of the Month, and awarded a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction. Katie also won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts, and she is a former MacDowell Fellow, whose work has taken her from Antarctica to the Arctic, and has a deep fascination with place. In 2025, she won the ALCS Tom Gallon Award for short fiction, and she has also won the Palette Poetry Prize, the Munster Chapbook Prize, and the Aesthetica Prize.
Malika Booker
Core Team
Malika’s writing spans poetry, theatre, monologue, installation, and education. She has worked with Arts Council England, the BBC, British Council, Wellcome Trust, National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Arvon, and Hampton Court Palace. She also ran ‘Malika’s Kitchen’, a writers’ collective based in London and Chicago. Her latest poetry collection Pepper Seed is published by Peepal Tree Press and she is featured in Penguin Modern Poets 3 with Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire.
Stevie Ronnie
Core Team
Stevie is a freelance writer and artist based in Northumberland. His experimental practice is rooted in language; encompassing literature, visual art, artist books, sculpture, film, performance and installation. Three times longlisted in the National Poetry Competition, he is the recipient of a Northern Writers Award and a Jerwood/Arvon menteeship. Stevie’s artist’s books are held in several high profile public collections including those of the British Library and The Bodleian Library at Oxford University. His artworks have been exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, the US and Japan and he is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships for his interdisciplinary works.
Tallulah Howarth
Core Team
Tallulah Howarth is a poet and multidisciplinary creative based in Leeds, an alum of the MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University, and a Writing Squad grad. Their writing has appeared in English PEN Transmissions, Metachrosis, Something Other, Rust & Moth, and Mugwort. In 2025, she took part in the ReWrite residency, an international exchange with Denmark. Her first pamphlet will be published in 2026 with Ossa Prints – a formalist sequence based on the square footage measurements in her house. They also DJ under the alias DJ TalisMan.
CORE2
In 2023 an uplift from Arts Council England enabled us to create a new team from Squad grads. CORE2 offers experienced Squad grads the opportunity to work with and as part of, the Core Team for 40 days over 18 months.
It’s a way of increasing our capacity while giving longer term opportunities to gain writer development skills. It also helps us make real our post-covid ethos of being an organisation which is as much about sharing the knowledge within our community, as it is about top down training.
Helen Bowell, Georgia Affonso, Kym Deyn, Jamal Gerald, Jessica Wood and Lydia Hounat blazed the trail, Kayleigh, Lauren and Lydia will be taking up the baton for the rest of 2026-28.
Kayleigh Jayshree
CORE2
Kayleigh Jayshree is a poet, fiction writer and critic. Her poems have appeared in AndOtherPoems, Propel, berlin lit, fourteen poems and others. Her reviews have been published with PN Review, Poetry Book Society, the North and others. In 2024 she was invited to perform at Glastonbury Festival in their Poetry & Words tent. Her debut poetry pamphlet mango & starblush was published by fourteen poems in 2025. Kayleigh is based in London where she works in publishing. She runs the Short Cuts Short Story Club. Kayleigh joined the Squad in 2020.
Lauren Vevers
CORE2
Lauren is a Newcastle-based writer exploring the intersection of queerness, grief, memory and the environment. Lauren’s scripts have been longlisted for the Pint-Sized Playwriting Award and placed among the top submissions to the BBC Drama Room. Their debut short screened at BAFTA-qualifying and international festivals including Norwich Film Festival and LA Queer Film Fest. They deliver creative writing workshops across the North of England and their facilitation is informed by training as a psychotherapeutic counsellor. Following a Northern Writers Award with the Word Factory, they are developing new short fiction with mentorship support. Lauren joined the Squad in 2012.
Lydia Marchant
CORE2
Lydia Marchant is a writer for stage, screen and audio. Selected for the BBC’s Writers Academy 19/20 she has since has written for Holby City and multiple episodes of Casualty and EastEnders. She ‘s currently writing for Waterloo Road and co-wrote Simon Warne’s Never Too Late for Channel 5, starring Anita Dobson and Nigel Havers. Mumsy, her play about parenthood on a zero-hour contract, premiered in at Hull Truck Theatre, where she is an Affiliate Artist, developing a new play about women’s Sunday League football and endometriosis. Stuck about Britain’s teaching crisis, developed with education professionals and Live Theatre, was longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize. Previous credits include: Paines Plough, York Theatre Royal, Derby Theatre, Pilot Theatre, Separate Doors, Middle Child Theatre, Silent Uproar and The Roaring Girls. She is currently writing for Wondery’s Spotlight Award-winning British Scandal podcast, presented by Alice Levine and Matt Ford. She also worked on showbiz series Terribly Famous and an original 8- part podcast, Last Soviet, presented by NSYNC’s Lance Bass. Lydia is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow 2025-2027 at the University of Hull and runs Hull Truck Theatre’s Introduction to Screenwriting and Playwriting courses and Middle Child Theatre’s No Dress Code Young Writers Group. Lydia joined the Squad in 2016.
Our Board
Alexa von Hirschberg
Chair
Alexa von Hirschberg is Publishing Director at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, where she publishes literary fiction and non-fiction. In her eighteen years in the industry she has worked at Canongate, Bloomsbury and Faber & Faber, and published many bestselling and award-winning fiction and non-fiction authors including Reni Eddo-Lodge, Clare Chambers, Lucy Rose, Kae Tempest, Benjamin Myers, James McBride, Raymond Antrobus, Samantha Shannon, Patrick DeWitt and Brian Eno.
Angelique Tran Van Sang
Angelique is a literary agent at Felicity Bryan Associates, an independent literary agency in Oxford – the largest and most successful outside London. She moved to the agency after seven years at Bloomsbury Publishing, where she was a Commissioning Editor acquiring across fiction and non-fiction.
Beth Westbrook
Beth is a scriptwriter based on The Wirral. She’s passionate about improving the representation of Neurodivergence and Disability, and was featured in The Stage with the Neurodivergent Creatives Network, an online support network she co-founded. Her play ‘Sunny Girl’ is Arts Council funded, and is being developed with HER Productions. Her second play ‘Awareness’ was part of Unity Theatre’s Open Call, and was part of Traverse Theatre’s Breakthrough Writers in association with Lung Ha Theatre Company, alongside being shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting, and the Bruntwood Prize. She joined the Squad in 2020.
Cara McVean
Cara is a Script Development Executive, working with established and emerging screenwriters, developing their projects in line with current commissioning priorities. Prior to working in development, Cara cut her teeth in production, where she came up through the ranks on a Skillset scheme, FT2, eventually working as a drama coordinator on shows such as Scott and Bailey, Butterfly and Mount Pleasant.
Chloe Elliott
Chloe is an artist and writer based in York. She is a Winner of the 2022 New Poets Prize and the 2020 Creative Future Writer’s Award. Her debut pamphlet, ‘Encyclopaedia’ was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2023. Her writing can be found in bath magg, Poetry Birmingham, The North, Magma and Strix, amongst others. She currently works for Aesthetica and Modern Poetry in Translation. Chloe joined the Squad in 2020.
Gregory Kearns
Gregory is a poet based in Liverpool. He won the Northern Debut Award for Poetry in 2022 and has been published in Introduction X, Bath Magg, and Ink Sweat and Tears. He has worked on projects with organisations like English Heritage, Tmesis Theatre and No Dice Collective. Gregory now runs Neurodiversity in the Workplace training on behalf of The Brain Charity and has trained staff across a range of organisations like the NHS, Wildlife Trust and ASA. Before that he worked in numerous roles in the charity sector including in events management. Gregory joined the Squad in 2016 and the board in 2020.
James Varney
James is a Manchester-based writer and theatre maker, making work about cities with and for the people who live in them. James is Lead Artist of We Live Here, who make space for creative conversations with communities about their relationship to place. He has delivered on several Squad projects over the years. As a freelancer he has delivered projects for the BFI, HOME, Manchester Literature Festival, Manchester International Festival, Ignite Yorkshire and Transform Festival, using multi-arts practice to imagine and create the world we want to live in. James joined the Writing Squad in 2014.
Nadia Saeed
Nadia is Translation and International Manager at English PEN, and works across the translation programme, administering both PEN Translates and PEN Presents, and co-editing PEN Transmissions. She sits on the advisory board of independent publisher And Other Stories, and was a 2024 UK Creative Community Fellow. She is based in Yorkshire and credits her previous work in publishing and theatre for her passion for bringing people together through writing and storytelling.
Rory Thorp
Rory is a writer based in Widnes, Cheshire, who specialises in literary short stories. He has been published in the We Write the North anthology and was longlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2025. He project managed and edited Dear Stranger – a narrative chain writing project involving twelve Squad writers – and was one of eight Squad writers commissioned by Pinwheel to write and perform poetry for The Rugby League World Cup. He works as a Library Experience Advisor at the University of Manchester Library and joined the Squad in 2020.
Ruth Awolola
Ruth is an author, poet and workshop facilitator. A member of our current Squad, she is Learning Officer at the Manchester Poetry Library. A winner of the National Youth Slam, Slambassadors UK and Say Owt Slam Champion, Ruth is an Obsidian Foundation Alumna. She writes for a variety of audiences including poetry for children and young people. In 2018 she was one of five contributors to Rising Stars: New Young Voices in Poetry and features in several anthologies including Ana Sampson’s She is Fierce: Brave, Bold and Beautiful Poems by Women and She will Soar: Bright, brave poems of freedom by women, She has forthcoming contributions in children and young people’s poetry collections in both the UK and the United States. Ruth joined the Squad in 2020.
Tayiba Sulaiman
Tayiba is a writer and translator from Manchester. She is the 2021 winner of the Eugene Lee-Hamilton Poetry Competition and has read her work at the 23rd Poesiefestival in Berlin. She’s currently working at a literary agency while completing an Emerging Translators Mentorship with the National Centre for Writing. Tayiba joined the Squad in 2020.