Is Professor and director of the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of 15 published books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her work has won several international awards. Her account of being writer in residence in Antarctica, Ice Diaries, won Canada’s Banff International Mountain Film and Book Festival's Grand Prize and was named one of the best nature writing books of 2018. Her most recent novels include The Dhow House (2017) and Fire on the Mountain (2018); Day for Night won the 2022 Independent Publishers Association’s (US) Gold Medal in literary fiction in 2022. She has taught creative writing in Antarctica, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.

Is a Reader in Creative Writing and writer who teaches at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely across poetry, non-fiction and fiction. As well as the author of three novels she is the co-editor of bestselling The Creative Writing Coursebook, and her most recent book-length essay on attention in the internet age Radical Attention has been recommended by Ali Smith as one of the books for the next twenty years. Her collection of poetry Hymnal was nominated as Welsh book of the Month and her essays and short stories have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, The Paris Review and Prospect as well as broadcast on the BBC. As well as working at Birkbeck she has given talks and workshops across many contexts for London Zoo, RIBA, the Selfridges Group, MAD/Fest, and the British Council.

Is a literary consultant with over thirty years of experience working with writers and writing. She worked for several years at Bloomsbury Publishing and later moved into partnership with book scout Anne-Louise Fisher, representing a number of clients in Europe and the US. She was the co-founder and Director of the Literature Prize Foundation (known as the Folio Prize and now the Writers’ Prize) for which she remains a trustee. In support of the prize and in association with the British Library she designed and curated a series of annual events that explored the art of writing. She was an advisor to Confer, a company that provides educational events related to psychotherapy, on setting up a books division (shortlisted for the IPG’s Best Newcomer Award in 2021) and programming workshops that connect writing and issues related to mental health.