Our Authors
Sarah Airriess
Sarah has always wanted to be a time traveller, but in lieu of the necessary scientific advances, she trained as an animator instead, which brought her gainful employment in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and London. While at her dream job, plugged as usual into BBC Radio 4, she heard a drama about a doomed expedition, and realised that her true purpose in life was to make a graphic novel of The Worst Journey in the World. Before long she threw away her career to move to Cambridge, where the Scott Polar Research Institute holds the expedition archives, and started work. In 2019, Sarah went to Antarctica with the NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program in order to depict the place from first-hand experience. She currently lives in an ancient house with a thousand spiders and commutes back and forth from 1911 every day. Dreams really can come true.
The Worst Journey in the World website: https://worstjourney.com/
Sue Amos
After a freelance television career, Sue Amos took a career break and began to write in her spare time. Inspired by forgotten, misremembered scraps of history, she wrote two novels under the pen name Sarah Roux.
Her first, A Painted Samovar is a homage to her maternal Jewish grandfather while The Chronicles of Harriet Shelley gives voice to the first wife of the poet, Percy Shelley.
Submitting her 3rd novel to the Watson Little x Indie Novella Prize, Sue decided she needed to come out from the shadows to write under her real name, having an inkling this would prove to be auspicious! Born and bred in North London, and now resides in the Chilterns with her husband, son, and dog, Teardrop also represents a tribute to Sue’s Sri Lankan heritage and her work shedding light on the post-colonial culture of her ancestors. Teardrop won the 2023 Watson Little x Indie Novella Prize.
John Robert McMenemie was born in Cheshire, and studied architecture and English before relocating to London to pursue a career in music. He still writes songs and still draws buildings, but focuses mainly on writing fiction. His work has appeared in Sovereign, The Cabinet of Heed, and Storgy magazines, and been long listed for the Leicester Writes short story prize, and the Sandstone Press short fiction competition.
He lives in North London with his partner and their daughter. His first novel, Full Wire, was published by Indie Novella in January 2022.
J. R. McMenemie
Martin Raymond is an unrepentant late starter. After working in communications for the NHS, teaching in schools and universities, plus some broadcasting with BBC Radio Scotland, he studied creative writing at Stirling University. His work has been longlisted for the Watson, Little x Indie Novella Prize and shortlisted for the VS Pritchett Short Story Prize. His short stories have appeared in the New Writing Scotland annual collection in 2019, 2020 and 2023. Lotte is his first novel.
Martin Raymond
Emma has always loved writing, but reconnected and fell in love with writing again during the COVID lockdown and also attended the Indie Novella writing course. A proud member of the LGBTQIA+ Community, Emma is passionate about diversity and representation in her writing, and exploring the complexity of relationship and friendship dynamics. Her debut novel, Dial One For Revenge is based on Emma’s reflections and experiences linked to revenge and finding yourself again through adversity.
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Outside writing, Emma is an avid reader and film fan, having studied Film at University. She is passionate about mental health, having trained as a qualified counsellor. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @EmmaLBWrites
Emma Brand
Katie Mitchelson has worked as a youth worker in Hartlepool, in the North-east, which inspired the town of Waterfell in Wrecked. Her work with young people inspired a lot of her writing during her creative writing PhD, compelling her to write about teenagers who do not realise that they are victims, who do not realise that they are being groomed for criminality, and the wider problems of country lines.
Making sense of existence is the undercurrent of Katie's writing, as she seeks to unravel the complexities of inequality and raise awareness of important issues in the hope of inspiring important social reforms. Child criminal exploitation is just one of the sociological injustices Katie hopes to explore.
Katie Mitchelson
Damien Mosley is an English-Sri Lankan writer and founder of the independent publisher and social enterprise, Indie Novella. A former journalist and aid worker, Damien set up Indie Novella as a space for writers to come together as a community and form a peer-editing network to publish high-quality novels with unique storylines that mainstream publishers had shied away from.
Joined Up is Damien's first novel and was published by Indie Novella in autumn 2021. He lives in Haringey, London.
Damien Mosley
Tori Beat is a former lawyer turned writer from Derbyshire, where she lives with her husband and two young children. Tori rediscovered her love of writing after leaving her career in law to study an Arts & Humanities degree, which led her to submit her first novel, Class of ’99, to the Watson Little x Indie Novella Prize in 2023. Through her writing, Tori explores the taboo surrounding mental health, inspired by her own experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as issues of social and gender inequality and the impact and complexity of human relationships.
Tori Beat
Bernie McQuillan
Bernie McQuillan is a Northern Irish writer, originally from County Tyrone and based in Belfast with her husband and four children. Her short story won the North Belfast Festival award in 2023. Shortlisted stories were
published in the Bournemouth Writing and Leicester Writes anthologies and other stories appear in journals including Spontaneity, The Incubator, The Honest Ulsterman, Women's Way (Ireland) and The Birmingham Arts Journal (US).
In The Lobster Pot, the dramatic landscape of County Donegal is the perfect setting to explore Kitty’s obsession and destructive love and to meet Alana, the nurse-turned sleuth, in her debut mystery novel. Follow Bernie @BernieMcQuillan.
David Turnbull writes what could best be described as 'Fantasy Fiction' - sometimes this includes a 'Sci-Fi' or a'Horror' slant. Some of what he write contains traditional folk tale elements and most has a bit of a political flavour to it. David has featured in numerous wonderful publications and presses such as Transmundane Press, Exaggerated Press and Midnight Street Press, and his novel, HUSks, builds upon his experience working with trade unions and is a story of ordinary people working on the front lines when a destructive pandemic hits.
David Turnbull
Karen Edwards is an American author who writes literary fiction with elements of suspense. Or contemporary fiction. Or as she likes to say, "Gritty fiction with heart". Karen is a former Kindergarten teacher turned kick-ass fiction writer. Somebody Knows Something is a literary suspense novella, published by Indie Novella in 2021 and is Karen's breakthrough as an international writer.
K. K. Edwards
Alex is an author of over two hundred books, mainly for young people, but also, lately, for adults. In non-fiction Alex has written on subjects as diverse as sharks, robots, asteroids, flying reptiles and chocolate. Alex also write novels and stories in the genres of science fiction, mystery, historical and horror. His adult fiction includes the psychological thriller Mr Jones, published by Indie Novella. He is co-author of a comic ‘novel-in-emails', Work in Progress, published by Unbound.