Hasan Bamyani As a teacher in Afghanistan, Hasan Bamyani was attacked by the Taliban for teaching girls. When he fled in 2001 he was forced to leave his family behind in Iran. In 2006 he finally received leave to remain in Britain. He now works long hours in a department store and a cinema, [...]

Hussam Eddin Baramo The copyright painting by Ismail Al-Rifai. appears on the cover of Grave Seas, Hussam's poetry collection, published 2021 by Palewell. Hussam is a poet and journalist who was born in Syria and whose poetry collection in English is Grave Seas (Palewell, 2021). He co-founded a publishing company Al-Wa'l in Damascus [...]

Valbona Bashota Valbona Bashota a Kosovan Albanian born in Kosovo, arrived in the UK in 1994 due to the Serbian repression in Kosova. She studied psychology and journalism at City University in London gaining her degree in 2002. Her poetry was published in many Albanian newspapers, magazines and publications and she took part in [...]

Nazand Begikhani Nazand Begikhani, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, is the Vincent Wright Chair and Visiting Professor at Paris’s Grande Ecole Sciences Po. Begikhani is a leading researcher on gender-based violence (GBV), having conducted research on many aspects of violence and gender relations, including honour-based violence and honour killings in [...]

Anna Blasiak Anna Blasiak is a poet, translator, journalist and literature co-ordinator of the European Literature Network. Anna writes poetry in Polish and in English. Her bilingual poetry and photography book (with Lisa Kalloo) Kawiarnia przy St James’s Wrena w porze lunchu / Café by Wren’s St-James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime is out from Holland House Books. [...]

Leonardo Boix Leonardo Boix was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1975, and since 1997 has lived in London and Deal, Kent. He read Latin American Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he also gained an MA in Latin American Literature and Culture. He studied at The Poetry School in London with [...]

JJ Bola Born in Kinshasa, JJ Bola is a poet, writer, Kit de Waal Scholar, and United Nations High Commission ambassador for refugees. As a self-proclaimed ‘refugee with a British passport’, Bola was confronted with that sense of ‘heimatloss’ in the UK, when he was prohibited from participating in international basketball tournaments despite being [...]

Amba Bongo Amba Bongo was born in Kinshasa in 1962, She studied at the Institut Superieur Pédagogique de la Gombe, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, where she graduated in English and African Culture. She then went on to study Psychology at the University of Warocqué, Mons, Belgium. Her first novel was Une Femme en [...]

Nafissa Boudalia Nafissa Boudalia is from Algeria and now lives in London. She is both a poet and painter and occasionally returns to her country to paint at great risk to herself. She has worked as a journalist since 1969, originally working for Algerian newspapers 'El Moudjahid' and 'Algerie Actualites'. In 1967, she won [...]

Maria Eugenia Bravo Maria Eugenia Bravo Calderara is a Chilean writer in exile. In 1992 she published her first poetry book in London "prayer in the National Stadium which received a prize from the Greater London Council. In 1993 she published a book about Pablo Neruda's poetry in Chile. Her short stories have recently [...]