Eyes Wide Shut

Winnie M Li is an author and activist. A Harvard graduate, she previously wrote for travel guide books, produced independent feature films, and programmed for film festivals. Driven by her own experience of rape, she founded Clear Lines, the UK’s first festival addressing sexual assault and consent through the arts and discussion, and began her PhD research at the LSE. She has an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland in recognition of her work.

Jessica Moor grew up in south-west London and studied English at Cambridge before completing a Creative Writing MA at Manchester University where her dissertation was awarded the Creative Writing Prize for Fiction.

Prior to this she spent a year working in the violence against women and girls sector and this experience inspired her first novel, Keeper. Her second novel, Young Women, was published in 2022.

She was selected as one of the Guardian’s 10 best debut novelists of 2020, longlisted for the 2020 Desmond Elliot Prize and a Mystery Writers of America Award. She won the 2022 Nouvelle Voix du Polar. She lectures in Creative Writing and is currently working on her third novel, Hold Back the Night.

Clare Shaw has four poetry collections with Bloodaxe; their latest collection, Towards a General Theory of Love, was awarded a Northern Writer’s Award, and was published in May 2022. Clare is Co-Director of the Kendal Poetry Festival and a regular tutor for Wordsworth Grasmere and the Arvon Foundation. Clare is also a mental health trainer with a particular interest in trauma, creativity and wellbeing. In collaboration with Winnie M Li, Clare was the recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Literature Matters Award in 2019, creating workshops and a free online resource for survivors of trauma, available via the below link.