Our Authors
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Julia Boggio
Julia Boggio is a multi-award winning photographer and writer. Her debut novel, Shooters, recently won the Selfies Award for Adult Fiction at London Book Fair and gold in the Wishing Shelf Awards. Her second book, Chasing the Light, is shortlisted for Romantic Comedy of the Year with the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
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Jayne Castel
Award-winning author Jayne Castel writes epic Historical and Fantasy Romance set in both Dark Ages and Medieval Scotland, and Romantasy with a Celtic vibe. Her vibrant characters, richly researched historical settings and action-packed adventure romance transport readers to forgotten times and imaginary worlds.
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Paige Cowan-Hall
Paige Cowan-Hall grew up in Buckinghamshire and London before studying English Literature at Exeter University. She won the 2023 Discoveries Prize, the 2021 Desperate Literature Award, was a 2021 Spread the Word Awardee and has had her scripts shortlisted by the British Film Institute and Playground Theatre.
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Melanie Cantor
Melanie Cantor was a celebrity agent and publicist for over thirty years. In 2004, she hosted a makeover show on Channel 4 called Making Space and in 2017 having just turned 60 she appeared as a ‘real model’ in the most recent Dove campaign. She is the author of Life and Other Happy Endings and The F**k It List.
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C.J. Cooke
C.J. Cooke is an award-winning poet, novelist and academic who also writes as Carolyn Jess-Cooke. Born in Belfast, C.J. has a PhD in Literature from Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. C.J. Cooke lives in Glasgow with her husband and four children
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Nadia El-Fassi
Nadia El-Fassi is a half-Moroccan, half-Australian author of spicy romance and fantasy. They have an addiction to iced coffee, period dramas, buying D&D dice and watching horror movies. They live in London with their husband and perfectly round cat. Best Hex Ever is Nadia’s debut novel.
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Elliot Fletcher
Elliot Fletcher resides in her too-small flat in Edinburgh, Scotland, with her husband, cat and dog. When she isn’t writing about swoon-worthy, lovable men and the captivating heroines they fall for, you can find her browsing second-hand book shops, collecting pebbles on the beach, or re-watching the 2005 Pride & Prejudice.
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Kate Foster
Kate Foster has been a national newspaper journalist for over twenty years. Growing up in Edinburgh, she became fascinated by its history and often uses it as inspiration for her stories. Her first novel, The Maiden, was a feminist revisionist take on the Scottish legend of The White Lady of Corstorphine. The King's Witches is her second novel.
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Sharon Gosling
Sharon Gosling started her career as an entertainment journalist, writing non-fiction books about film and television. She is also the author of multiple children’s books. Sharon and her husband live in a small village in northern Cumbria.
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Lesley McDowell
Glasgow-basedLesley McDowell is the author of three novels, including her most recent, Clairmont. She works as an editorial consultant and was for many years a literary critic. Dr McDowell has won three Creative Scotland awards, and has a PhD on the work of James Joyce.
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Georgina Moore
Georgina Moore grew up in London and lives on a houseboat on the River Thames with her partner, two children and Bomber, the Border Terrier. The Garnett Girls is her first novel and is set on the Isle of Wight, where Georgina and her family have a holiday houseboat called Sturdy.
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Amita Murray
Amita Murray lives in London. Just to keep things interesting, she writes in two genres. Her romance novels take you on a romp through the edgier streets of Regency England. Her Arya Winters mysteries are under a TV option. Her mystery novel Thirteenth Night won the Exeter Novel Prize in 2022.
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Maggie O'Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell is the author of Hamnet, Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, both Sunday Times no. 1 bestsellers. Her novels include After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, The Hand That First Held Mine and The Marriage Portrait, as well as two books for children. She lives in Edinburgh.
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Emma Orchard
Emma Orchard is the pen name of Alison Berry Bonomi. Born in Salford, she studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh (where she won the Saintsbury Prize). She worked behind the scenes in publishing and TV for many years, and set up the LBA literary agency in 2005. She began writing her first original Regency romance in lockdown.
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Rebecca Ryan
Rebecca Ryan lives in Bradford with her three young children. Although she always loved writing, it hadn’t really occurred to her that she could do it professionally. She recently left her job as a teacher to pursue writing full-time. She enjoys walking in the countryside and takeaways (if that counts as a hobby).
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Sara Sheridan
Sara Sheridan is an award-winning writer and activist who has written more than 20 books. In 2022, The Fair Botanists was Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year and a season 7 pick for The Queen’s Reading Room. Her latest novel, The Secrets of Blythswood Square, is out now.
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Heidi Swain
Heidi Swain is a Sunday Times Top Ten best-selling author. Her stories all have a strong sense of community, family and friendship. Heidi lives in beautiful west Norfolk. She is passionate about gardening, the countryside, collecting vintage paraphernalia and reading.
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Lucy Jane Wood
Lucy Jane Wood is an online content creator, avid reader and cosiness-seeker from the Wirral. These days, you’ll find her living in London, giant coffee in hand, and being headbutted at any given time by her cat. Rewitched is her debut novel.
Meet our Chairs
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Jane Anderson
Jane will be chairing our Insight Into Indie and Traditional Publishing event with Julia Boggio, Jayne Castel, and Elliot Fletcher.
Jane Anderson is one of the Women's Fiction Festival's founders, a founder and host of the Edinburgh Writers’ Forum, and writes historical fiction. The Girl Who Fled the Picture was published in 2023, and The Paintress in July 2024. Jane’s next novel The Orchid Hunter’s Daughter was Highly Commended in the Jenny Brown Associates Debut Writers Over 50 Award.
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Jenny Brown OBE
Jenny Brown will be chairing our inspiration voices event with Maggie O'Farrell.
She is one of Scotland’s leading literary agents and recently received an OBE for services to literature in the King's Birthday Honours List. She was previously Head of Literature at the Scottish Arts Council, presenter of book programmes for Scottish Television, and founder Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She was shortlisted in 2014 and 2020 for the Agent of the Year Award. She was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2021.
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Claire Daverley
Claire will be chairing our Modern Family panel with Melanie Cantor and Georgina Moore.
Claire Daverley has been writing stories since she was 6 years old, inspired by art, film and many trips to the library. After graduating with a degree in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, she began a career in publishing, writing about books by day but penning her own by night, on trains, and in the light of the early mornings. Her debut novel Talking at Night has sold in 22 languages and optioned for TV. She has spent most of her life in Hertfordshire, but recently relocated to Dunoon, Scotland.
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Katrina Kendrick
Katrina is chairing our Regency Romance panel with Amita Murray and Emma Orchard.
Katrina Kendrick is the pseudonym for Sunday Times bestselling science fiction and fantasy author Elizabeth May. She is Californian by birth and Scottish by choice, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews. She currently resides on an 18th-century farm in the Scottish countryside with her husband, three cats, and a lively hive of honeybees that live in the wall of her old farmhouse.
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Ann Landmann
Ann will be chairing our Bewitched panel with Nadia El-Fassi and Lucy Jane Wood.
Growing up in East Germany on a steady diet of Grimms and Russian Fairy Tales until falling under the thrall of Tolkien and Pratchett in her teens, it is little surprising that Ann Landmann is now the founder and director of Cymera: Scotland's Festival of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Writing. Some might say it's a cunning ploy to feed her addiction to those genres. In her spare time she sells books for one of Scotland's publishers and moonlights at other people's book festivals.
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Dr Jean Menzies
Jean will be chairing the Something Wicked This Way Comes panel, discussing Scotland's witch trials with C.J. Cooke and Kate Foster.
Dr Jean Menzies is an ancient historian, presenter, and author from Scotland. She holds a PhD in classics, with a focus on gender, myth, and rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Her first book, Greek Myths: Meet the Heroes, Gods, and Monsters of Ancient Greece, was published by DK in 2020 and won the Books Are My Bag Breakthrough Author Award that same year. Since then, she has continued to write for all ages and can be found under ‘jeansthoughts’ on YouTube and TikTok.
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Kim Sherwood
Kim Sherwood will be chairing our event with Sara Sheridan and Lesley McDowell on history’s forgotten women walking in men's shadows.
She is an author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her first novel, Testament, won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second book, Double or Nothing, is the first in a series commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of James Bond. The follow-up, A Spy Like Me, came out in April 2024.
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Sara-Jade Virtue
Sara-Jade Virtue will be chairing our Happy Ever Afters event with
Sharon Gosling, Rebecca Ryan and Heidi Swain.Sara-Jade Virtue has worked in the book industry for nearly 22 years, firstly at Waterstones Head Office in the Fiction Buying Team. She joined Simon & Schuster UK in 2007 and spent 12 years as Special Sales Director and Brand Director, before moving into Editorial as Brand Development Director, working across the commercial women’s fiction list. She runs the Books and the City community, manages the #DigitalOriginals publishing programme, #OneDay open submission project, and leads the Jackie Collins publishing programme. She’s also the founder of the #RespectRomFic movement, aiming to increase the profile of romantic novelists in the UK.
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Annabelle Wright
Annabelle will be chairing our Discoveries panel with Paige Cowan-Hall, Ciara Finan, and Rachel Morrell.
Annabelle Wright is Project Manager at the Women's Prize Trust, working across delivery of the Women's Prizes for Fiction and Non-Fiction, as well as partnerships and charitable outreach projects, including Discoveries; the Women's Prize Trust's writer development programme run in partnership with Curtis Brown, Curtis Brown Creative and Audible. Annabelle has a background in PR, and was previously Head of Publicity at EDPR, where she worked for seven years across campaigns for adult and children's books as well as awards and events, including The Yoto Carnegies, the BBC Short Story Awards, the Wainwright Prize and the Comedy Women in Print Prize.