Dr Aifric Campbell and Gita Ralleigh invite you to join us as we discuss the challenges of the writing life.
Our guests will share their varying perspectives and experiences, as we explore how to sustain both a literary career and a creative practice in the 21st century.
The panel includes Tamarind magazine publisher and writer Anita Chandran; literary agent and author Catherine Cho; debut YA novelist Jess Popplewell; and novelist and creative writing lecturer Aifric Campbell.
The event will be chaired by Gita Ralleigh and there will be an opportunity for questions from the audience.
Panel
Gita Ralleigh (chair) is a poet, writer and ex-doctor born to Indian immigrant parents in London. She teaches creative writing at Imperial College. Her poetry books are A Terrible Thing (Bad Betty Press, 2020) and Siren (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). Her children’s novels The Destiny of Minou Moonshine and The Voyage of Sam Singh are published by Zephyr/Bloomsbury.
Catherine Cho is a literary agent and founder of Paper Literary. She has worked for agencies in New York and London, with a particular focus on finding debut authors. She has negotiated six and seven figure deals in the US and UK. Catherine is also an author, her memoir Inferno, A Memoir Of Motherhood and Madness was shortlisted for the Sunday Times’ Young Writer of the Year Award and a New York Times’ Editor’s Choice.
Aifric Campbell is the author of four novels. Her latest book, The Love Makers (2021) combines a novel with contributor essays to explore how AI and robotics are transforming the future of human love. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Irish Times and awards include a fellowship at UCLA and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. A former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, she became the first woman managing director on the London trading floor. Born in Dublin, studied in Sweden, Aifric received her PhD from the University of East Anglia. She teaches at Imperial College London.
Jess Popplewell is the author of The Dark Within Us, winner of the Chairman’s Prize in the Times/Chicken House competition 2022. Having experienced insecure housing as a teenager, Jess is passionate about preventing homelessness for young people. She was a host for the York-based charity SASH for three years, offering her spare bedroom to young people in need of emergency accommodation. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found in the Careers Service at Imperial College.
Anita Chandran is a writer and editor. After finishing a PhD in ultrafast fibre lasers at Imperial College, she worked as a science writer at the European Southern Observatory and European X-ray Free-Electron Laser, as well as writing freelance for news outlets like BBC Sky at Night. She is currently an associate editor at Nature Communications and the fiction editor of Tamarind, a literary magazine focused on the intersections of the arts and sciences. She has worked in historical fiction, science pedagogy, and AI ethics and was overall winner of the Royal College of Science’s 2019 writing challenge for her short story (Nothing but) Art.
This event is in-person only. Register now (left or below). Registration will close 24 hours before the event (Wednesday 19:00).