The first cohort of writers were selected by a panel of five industry representatives, chaired by author and academic Sandeep Parmar and including: President of the National Eisteddfod Court, Ashok Ahir; poet, performer and novelist, Patience Agbabi; writer, artist and editor, Sadia Pineda Hameed, and literary agent Natalie Jerome.
Discover more about the panel below.
Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing. She holds a PhD from University College London and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her books include Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), an edition of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet, 2011) and two books of her own poetry published by Shearsman: The Marble Orchard (2012) and Eidolon (2015), winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Statesman, The Financial Times, and the TLS. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker and co-founder of the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics scheme for Black, Asian and minority ethnic reviewers.
Patience Agbabi FRSL is a popular poet, performer and novelist. Since 2008, she has been a Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University. Patience was Canterbury Laureate from 2009 to 2010 and received a Grant for the Arts and an Authors Foundation Grant to write a contemporary version of The Canterbury Tales. This fourth collection, Telling Tales (Canongate, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and Wales Book of the Year’s Poetry Category 2015. Patience’s debut, middle-grade novel The Infinite (Canongate, 2020), is the first of the Leap Cycle series and was CBBC book of the month for July 2020. The sequel, The Time-Thief, is due in 2021.
Ashok Ahir is the elected President of the National Eisteddfod Court and Chair of the Eisteddfod Management Board. He was the Chair of the Organising Committee for the National Eisteddfod in Cardiff in 2018, an event that has been praised for its inclusiveness and openness.
Until recently he was Director of Communications for the UK Government in Wales and is currently working on major communications projects for the Cabinet Office.
He brings a wealth of business and management experience to the role having previously co-founded the communications agency, Mela, and as former head of politics at BBC Cymru Wales.
He is a board member at Sport Wales and sits on the British Council's Wales Advisory Committee.
Originally from Wolverhampton, Ashok grew up in a Punjabi-speaking household, but has since learnt Welsh fluently, and reached the final of the Welsh Learner of the Year Award in 2012.
Sadia Pineda Hameed is a half-Filipina half-Pakistani writer, artist and editor living in Cardiff. Her writing practice includes poetry and experiments in prose, as well as text-based film, installation and performance. Her work often explores collective and inherited trauma; in particular, the latent ways we speak about this through dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets as an anti-colonial strategy inherent to us. Sadia has shown work with Artes Mundi, National Museum Wales, g39 WARP, Peak Cymru, Arcade/Campfa, SHIFT, Gentle/Radical, the Eisteddfod, HOAX, and forthcoming with MOSTYN and Bluecoat; and has been published with Zarf, Amberflora, Porridge, Wales Arts Review and LUMIN among others. She is currently writing her first long-form piece: a creative non-fiction novella, To Make Philippines, supported by the Literature Wales Bursary and Mentoring Scheme 2020. She was one of the Rising Stars Wales 2020.
Sadia is also co-founder of LUMIN, a small press, curatorial collective and radio programme for experimental, radical and personal literature and art. She has spoken about contemporary publishing and multidisciplinary archiving at Bangor University’s Women in Publishing Symposium, Cardiff University's Archiving Gender Symposium, Gentle/Radical’s Imagination Forum, and curated the WARP Library Dialogue.
Natalie Jerome has worked as a publisher and acquiring editor for Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan, Bonnier Books and HarperCollins. She now works for literary agency Aevitas Creative Management. Included in the 2018 publishing trade magazine The Bookseller’s Industry top 100, she was described as a “brand publishing wizard” having acquired and published books that have sold, during the course of her career, six million copies. Natalie specializes in non-fiction with a specific focus on entertainment and lifestyle and has commissioned and published books by a host of high profile names including the multi-million copy-selling One Direction titles as well as books from Chris Evans, Alan Carr, George Best, Scarlett Moffatt and Gary Barlow. As a literary agent, her clients include the actor David Harewood and Sir Lenny Henry.
As one of the few black Publishers in the UK, Natalie has worked to improve diversity within the industry. She was a founding trustee and is advisory board member of Creative Access, a mentoring and graduate trainee scheme for Black, Asian and minority ethnic candidates looking for paid internships across the creative industries and media sector. In 2016 Natalie was highly commended for her work at the National Business in the Community Race Equality Awards.
Natalie is on Literature Wales' Board of Directors.
