Kitty Blandy

Kitty Blandy is a visual artist who works with drawing and sculpture. The subject of her work centres on the body, and has as much to do with being in as looking at a body. Her study is driven principally by ontological curiosity: how being in a body feels physically and metaphysically; environmental and humanist theology; human/animal empathy, and extinction. Her work is represented in the UK and Canada and is included in many collections, notably the Primary Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Ian Bride

Ian spent many years at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology as an interdisciplinary academic/ teacher/researcher/practitioner in biodiversity conservation & environmental education. He also completed a BTec in Art and Design & was Associate Artist at Open School East. He took early retirement in 2020 to more fully exercise his creativity, primarily exploring human/nature discourses, whilst seeking to challenge positionalities that underpin prevailing environmental and conservation narratives, whilst giving a novel ‘voice’ to nature.

Elleke Boehmer

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English in the English Faculty, University of Oxford, and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of a number of books, including fiction and two short story collections. Southern Imagining, a literary history of the far southern hemisphere, her seventh monograph, will be published by Princeton University Press, in 2025.

Catherina Campillay

Catherina Campillay (Viña del Mar, 1994) is a Chilean poet, researcher and editor. PhD candidate on Literature (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) working on Latin-American zoopoetics. Editor and founder of Ágata Musgo Editora. She published the poetry book “presunta desgracia” (2021). She was a grantee of the Pablo Neruda Foundation in 2017 and of the Fondo Nacional del Libro y la Lectura in 2018 and 2021. In 2018 she won an honorable mention in the Roberto Bolaño Prize in poetry.

Chris Danta

Chris Danta is a professor of literature in the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University. Along with his academic writing, he has published poetry and music for animation. He published a creative essay in The Finlay Lloyd Book About Animals and script-edited and produced music for the award-winning 2003 animated film Mother Tongue. He dreams of having the time to produce an album of electronic music and a chapbook.

Emily Doolittle

Emily is an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Lecturer in Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She has written for ensembles such as Symphony Nova Scotia, the Glasgow University Chapel Choir, the Vancouver Symphony & Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal, and soloists such as pianist Rachel Iwaasa and soprano Patricia Green. She has an ongoing interest in zoomusicology, which she explores in both her composition and through interdisciplinary collaboration with biologists.

Ceridwen Dovey

Ceridwen Dovey is an award-winning Australian writer of fiction (Only the Astronauts; Only the Animals; Mothertongues; Blood Kin; In the Garden of the Fugitives) and creative non-fiction (On J.M. Coetzee; Inner Worlds Outer Spaces). She is the recipient of an Australian Museum Eureka Award for her science writing, and is co-founder of The Archival Futures Film Collective. Ceridwen is a Macquarie University Research Fellow (where she is exploring the art and science of exoplanets), and a Powerhouse Artistic Associate.

Isabel Galleymore

Isabel Galleymore is a poet and critic publishing on contemporary poetry, environmental writing and ecocriticism, with a focus on interdisciplinarity.

Lesley Harrison

Lesley Harrison lives on Scotland’s north-east coast, and in her poetry and prose she records its layers of occupation, its languages and its deep, ancient orientation towards the north. Her writing takes place among the soundscapes, migration routes, relics and settlements of the North Atlantic rim, and asks how our experience of these is thinned or altered in this age of sudden change. Lesley has held residencies in Iceland, Greenland and Svalbard, and is a member of the North Sea Poets collective.

Susan Hope

Susan Pope is an independent author and leader of Kent Writing Groups. She grew up in Medway, close to the historic City of Rochester. Susan writes fiction, based on true historical events which inform her characters and stories. Susan is passionate about supporting women writers, and leads women’s writing group, Medway Mermaids, where members can progress their writing journey within a supportive social ethos.

Sospeter Kiambi

Sospeter Kiambi is a Senior Research Scientist at Wildlife Research & Training Institute in Kenya. He has over 17 years of working experience in wildlife research, and he is currently pursuing a PhD at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) in the University of Kent on the Human-elephant co-existence in a post-ivory ban landscape.

Matilda Leyser

Matilda Leyser studied English Literature at university but then ran away to join the circus, becoming an aerial artist. After ten years, she came down to earth to take up the far more dangerous act of writing. She has published one novel, No Season but the Summer and is writing another at Kent university, with an ICCI scholarship. She has two children, is the founder of a movement for creative carers, M/Others who Make and a Director with Improbable, a world-renowned theatre company.

Cass Lynch

Dr. Cass Lynch is a Noongar woman, and writer and researcher. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Curtin University in Perth, and her PhD explored Aboriginal stories that reference climate change. She is a member of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories group who focus on the revitalisation of song and language connected to south coast Noongar people. Her borongur/totem is the Trapdoor Spider and this inspires her in writing about ecology, deep time, relationality, temporality, and language.

Brett Mills

Brett Mills is Honorary Professor of Media and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Animals on Television (2017). He was a member of the team for the AHRC-funded research projects, ‘Multispecies Storytelling: More-Than-Human Narratives About Landscape’ (2019-22) & ‘Multisensory Multispecies Storytelling to Engage Disadvantaged Groups in Changing Landscapes’ (2020-22). He is member of the Culivian: Culturas Literarias y Visuales del Animal Research Group at the University of Valencia, Spain.

Monica Minott

Winsome Monica Minott is a chartered accountant and poet from Jamaica. Her poetry collection Zion Roses (2021) was longlisted for the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and she has received two awards in the Jamaican National Book Development Council’s annual literary competitions for book-length collections of her poetry. She is also the author of two other poetry collections: 'Kumina Queen' (2016), and most recently 'Wandering Spirits of Exile' (2025)

Nicole Mollett

Nicole Mollett is a Kent-based Artist, Curator and Writer. She makes visually rich art that celebrates diversity, engages communities, and encourages intercultural connections. She believes the more diverse a community is the richer and stronger it is. She draws imagined realities collaging a range of research images found in museums, local archives, and real places she has visited. She thinks it is important for people to learn about their history. Her work often celebrates alternative histories and forgotten people and places of significance.

Nathan Morehouse

Dr. Nathan Morehouse is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Cincinnati, where he leads a large team of researchers studying how animals see. He is also the founding director of the Institute for Research in Sensing, a transdisciplinary research institute focused on sensing, perception, and sensor technology development through deep integration between STEM, the humanities, and the arts. As a poet, photographer, and musician himself, Dr. Morehouse feels at home playing, dreaming, and building at the interfaces between art and science.

Suniti Namjoshi

Suniti Namjoshi is a fabulist, a poet, a satirist and a feminist. She was born in Mumbai, India and lives in the southwest of England. Her books include Feminist Fables, The Blue Donkey Fables, The Fabulous Feminist, Suki, Aesop the Fox, The Good-Hearted Gardeners and Matriarchs, Cows and Epic Villains.

Susan Richardson

Susan Richardson is a writer, performer and educator. Her latest book, Where the Seals Sing (William Collins, 2022), is a work of creative nonfiction focusing on the Atlantic grey seal, blending natural history and travel, memoir and myth. Susan is also a poet: her fourth and most recent collection, Words the Turtle Taught Me, themed around endangered ocean species, emerged from her residency with the Marine Conservation Society and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award.

Adedayo Sadiku

My name is Adedayo Sadiku, Whole Systems Obesity Office (East Kent). My role sits within Public Health, Kent County Council, and I work on the Whole Systems Approach to a Healthy Weight in Kent Programme, focusing on increasing physical activity, healthy eating and living a healthier lifestyle among the people in the community.

Zoë Sadokierski

Zoë Sadokierski is a designer, writer and creative producer based in Gulgadya / Sydney. An Associate Professor (Design) at the University of Technology Sydney, her practice-based research explores human impacts on the natural world through visual narrative, anarchival collage and creative nonfiction. Her book Father, Son and Other Animals (Cordite 2024) explores climate change and species extinction through the lenses of parenting and creative practice. It’s funnier than it sounds.

Shreyasi Sharma

Shreyasi Sharma is a writer and educator from India. She was the 2023 Charles Wallace India Trust Creative Writing Fellow at University of Kent. She writes poems and essays on transforming spaces. Her words have appeared in many journals, and in 2022 Red River Press published her poems and narrative non-fiction about the city in an anthology titled Of Dry Tongues and Brave Hearts. Her recent essay, ‘Crows in this part of New Delhi’ was published in Rumpus, 2024. She is currently working on a nonhuman novella.

Alex South

Alex South (alexsouth.org) is a musician & researcher with a passion for multispecies musicking: paying musical attention to the sounds of other animals with the goal of mutual flourishing. Based in Scotland, where he holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship at IASH (University of Edinburgh), his improvisations and compositions are often inspired and informed by the voices of cetaceans. He performs regularly with Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra on clarinet and bass clarinet.

Josie Rae Turnbull

Josie Turnbull is an interdisciplinary artist & freelance artist facilitator/ educator based in London. In her practice, she is particularly interested in the concept of the 'absolute fake', using it as a tool to reveal latent truths about our excessive systems of extraction. Since 2021, her research has evolved into ‘factual fables’ – narratives that blend real-world case studies with elements of science fiction to satirize human failings through specific animal protagonists. Her current work focuses on creating visual fables for the Arowana fish: a ‘mass produced endangered species.’

Sarah Westcott

Sarah Westcott has published two collections with Pavilion Poetry: Slant Light, highly commended in the Forward Prizes, and Bloom, shortlisted for the Ledbury Hellens Prize for best second collections in 2023 & longlisted in the Laurel Prize for ecopoetry. Her second pamphlet, Pond, a hybrid piece, was published by The Braag in 2024 and a new chapbook, Almanac, is forthcoming in 2025. She is a recipient of a Midlands4Cities scholarship & researching an AHRC-funded PhD on the poem as multi-species event at the Universities of Birmingham & Warwick.