Gavin Francis is an award-winning writer and GP. He is the author of four books of non-fiction, including Adventures in Human Being, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the Saltire Scottish Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and Empire Antarctica, which won Scottish Book of the Year in the SMIT Awards and was shortlisted for both the Ondaatje and Costa Prizes. He has written for the Guardian, The Times, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. His work is published in twenty languages. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
@gavinfranc | gavinfrancis.com
Amy Liptrot is the author of The Outrun and The Instant, which were both Sunday Times bestsellers. She writes columns and reviews for various magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the Orcadian and presented the BBC Radio 4 series The New Anatomy of Melancholy. The Outrun was awarded the Wainwright Prize and the PEN Ackerley Prize, and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. It was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and featured on the BBC Radio 2 Book Club. In 2024 it was adapted by Amy and Nora Fingscheidt into a BAFTA and London Critics' Circle Film Awards-nominated film starring Saoirse Ronan. Amy's second book, The Instant, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
@amy_may | @amymayyyy
Chitra Ramaswamy is a writer, journalist, and critic.
Homelands (Canongate), a book about her friendship with a German Jewish refugee called Henry Wuga, won the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was included in
The Guardian's top memoirs and biographies of 2022. Her first book,
Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy (Saraband) won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award, was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, and was reissued in spring 2024. She has contributed essays to a number of collections and judged literary prizes including the Baillie Gifford prize for Non-Fiction, the Gordon Burn Prize, and the Desmond Elliot. Her latest book, a collection of micro-essays called
Rich Things for the Alasdair Gray Archive, was published in spring 2026. She is the restaurant critic for
The Times Scotland, for which she has won Food and Drink Writer of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards for four consecutive years and been shortlisted twice for Restaurant Writer of the Year at the Guild of Food Writers. She is also an occasional restaurant critic for
The Observer, a TV critic and writer for
The Guardian, and a regular contributor to
Writers Mosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund. She is from London and lives in Leith, Edinburgh.
Malachy Tallack is one of the most exciting and critically acclaimed writers to emerge from Scotland in the past decade, and has won praise from Robert Macfarlane, Bernard MacLaverty, Sara Baume, Madeleine Bunting, Will Self and John Burnside, among others. He was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award for 60 Degrees North; The Un-Discovered Islands was named Illustrated Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2016; and The Valley at the Centre of the World was shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize and longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize.
@malachytallack | malachytallack.com
Amanda Thomson is a Scottish writer and visual artist, and a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, was published in 2018. She has spoken at many book festivals and had her work published in Antlers of Water, Willowherb Review, The Wild Isles, Gifts of Gravity and Light and the Guardian. She lives and works in Strathspey in the Scottish Highlands and Glasgow.
@passingplace | passingplace.com
