Ryan Vance

Ryan Vance is a writer and editor based in Glasgow, with work published in New Writing Scotland, Gutter Magazine, The Glasgow Review of Booksand The Dark Mountain. Between 2010 and 2016 he created and edited The Queen’s Head, a speculative fiction magazine. He has edited fiction for theislandreview.com and currently edits reviews for guttermag.co.uk. In 2017 he created Queer Words Project Scotland, a mentoring scheme for Scottish writers in which queerness is the qualifying factor. In 2018 it will pair four emerging writers with four professionals to workshop new queer writing and publish an anthology in Spring 2019. ryanvance.co.uk | twitter.com/ryanjjvance

Tara P Woolnough

Tara P Woolnough is a peculiar amalgamation of the elements, clothed in human form. Not long after emerging from her mother’s womb her very being became embroiled with words, reading and writing – an entanglement that continues until now and informs her vice as an ersatz writer and her subjective experience of so-called reality.

David Redford Palmer

The focus of my photographic practice has always been the natural world. As an untrained, self-taught photographer developing a relationship with landscape, inspiration came from artists as diverse as Fay Godwin, Andy Goldsworthy and Thomas Joshua Cooper. However, my particular fascination has been with the details of natural forms. Universal patterns, ambiguity of scale, the fractal essence of systems all provide objects of meditation and subjects to capture. If the devil is in the detail, then so too, surely, is the celestial.

E Saxey

E Saxey works in universities and likes and writes queer fiction. Their previous work includes pieces in The Fantasist, Transcendent and Unsung Stories. twitter.com/esaxey | lightningbook.wordpress.com/fiction-by-e-saxey/.

Ade Adesina RSA RGI

Ade Adesina, born in Nigeria 1980, is a full-time printmaker who lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. He studied printmaking at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen from 2008 graduating in 2012. Ade’s work is a visual commentary on the ideas of ecology and our ever-changing world. He is fascinated by how the human footprint is affecting our planet. Our world is full of wonderful landscapes and Ade wishes to highlight the continual damage caused to them through human activities such as deforestation, the politics of energy consumption, and the endangerment of wild species. He is a traditional printmaker, painter and sculptor. This artist combines cultures, producing work that makes people reflect on the past, present and the future. adeadesina.com

Louis Armand

Louis Armand is the author of the novels GlassHouse (2018), The Combinations (2016), Cairo (2014), and Breakfast at Midnight (2012). He lives in Prague. louis-armand.com

Alex Kennedy

Alex Kennedy is an art critic and art historian. He is the author of How Glasgow Stole the Idea of Contemporary Art and The Use of Style. His latest book Empty Subjects – Empty Signs is published by Daat Press. 

Olive M Ritch

Olive M Ritch has been published in literary magazines, anthologies and websites including Poetry Review, Agenda, Gutter, New Writing Scotland, The Poetry Cure, and In Protest: 150 Poems for Human Rights. She has also been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her work has received awards during her writing career and her poem, ‘The Hand Game’, was commended in the National Poetry Competition (2003), ‘A Message’ was commended in the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (2011), and her poem, ‘Beyond Words’, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2008).

Vivienne Chan

Vivienne Chan has a BA (Hons) in Design and Craft, specialising in 3D Design. Taking an experimental materialist approach for her degree’s final project, she created a range of lighting designs that explored themes of light, shadow and colour. As well as developing abstract forms in both 2D and 3D, Vivienne’s work has also focused on CAD for visualising furniture. Her interest in the technical side of creativity inspires her use of image editing software such as Sketsa and Compositor, where she practices creating new works by contrasting and combining shape, line, colour and different arrangements.

Daniel Pietersen

Daniel Pietersen is an author of weird/horror fiction and critical non-fiction, mostly interested in how the nature of horror is reflected in repetition, uncanny presences and eerie absences. His fiction work has appeared in The Audient Voidand Aether & Ichor, with essays on the limit experience in the work of Clive Barker and the eeriness of folk horror, pending publication in Thinking Horror and Revenant, respectively. In April 2018, he presented a paper at Sheffield University on the nature of horror in the D&D module ‘Ravenloft’. Daniel lives in Edinburgh with his wife and their dog.

Ever Dundas

Ever Dundas writes literary fiction, horror, fantasy and sci-fi. Her novel Goblinwon the Saltire First Book of the Year Award 2017. Ever is currently working on her second novel, HellSans, a sci-fi thriller. twitter.com/everdundas |instagram.com/everdundas | everdundas.com

John Dummett

With sculpture, performance and writing, John explores the interplay between different forms of language and how they are read, experienced and translated across multiple forms whether textual, spatial, social or otherwise. Underscoring this approach is the recognition that language, in all its iterations, is a statement on and of ‘publicness’. As an artist John has undertaken projects at the Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, Lothringer 13/Laden Munich, Lugar Comum Lisbon and recently at the University of Cumbria. In 2017 he completed a research-as-practice PhD at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.

Joma West

Joma West was born in London but lived and grew up in different countries in Africa. She studied English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow and then took up teaching. Joma’s novella, Wild, won the 2016 MMU novella award and was published by Sandstone Press. She has had short stories appear in To Hull and Back and Nivalis 2017. Joma writes in several genres and she likes to use the strange to highlight and interrogate the familiar. She believes stories are reflections of ourselves, and whilst they should definitely entertain, they should also help us understand what it is to be human. She currently lives in Glasgow. twitter.com/jomawest

Miranda Stuart

Miranda Stuart is a writer, designer and, sometimes, artist based in Glasgow. With a background in English Literature and Graphic Design, she makes work that plays with narrative and fragments of text and is interested in the bodily writings of Medieval female mystics. She collaborates with artist Nastja No on a publishing project called Agony Press.

David McMahon

David McMahon is an author from Glasgow interested in science fiction and dark fantasy, often merging both with themes of the human condition and how it integrates with technology. He is currently editing his first novel Boxhead, which is the first in a series collectively called ‘Midnight Tayles’ and publishes short stories to his online blog of the same name. dmcmahonjnr.wixsite.com/midnight-tayles

Bragela Hornal

Bragela Hornal writes dark fiction for adults and young people from her home in Edinburgh. She is currently working on her first children’s novel, Islands of Memory, a magical realist adventure. twitter.com/BragelaHornal

Ely Percy

Ely Percy’s first publication was in Big! magazine in 1994. Since then, they’ve released a memoir (Cracked, 2002), graduated with distinction from Glasgow University’s MPhil in Creative Writing (2004) and contributed over fifty short stories to literary journals. Their debut novel Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz was published by Knight Errant Press in March 2019.

Rhiannon A. Grist

Rhiannon A. Grist is a Welsh writer living in Edinburgh, whose weird work has featured in Strix, Monstrous Regiment, The Selkie and Shoreline of Infinity. She writes and performs with Writers’ Bloc. Her favourite ring on the hob is the top right. twitter.com/RhiannonAGrist.

Megan Jane

Megan Jane is a photographer who likes to capture the things we as humans may ordinarily miss or ignore. Inspired by the phenomena of everyday life, Megan uses her work to look closely at the details of our world, attempting to find a new perspective on the commonplace or familiar. 

Veronique Kootstra

Veronique Kootstra is from the Netherlands but for the past seventeen years has lived and worked in Edinburgh. English is now the language she writes and, weirdly, dreams in. Her work has appeared in 404 Ink magazine, The London Reader, The Scotsman and in various anthologies and websites. She won a highly commended writing award from the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. She is the Edinburgh Writers’ HQ rep and is currently working on her first novel. twitter.com/vkootstra

Klara Kofen

Klara Kofen writes, makes films, directs, designs and builds costumes and sets out of discarded materials. She is the Artistic Director of Waste Paper Opera, a London based experimental music theatre and performance collective. Occasionally, she investigates international trade shows. Her work is influenced by her research into the impact new technologies have on notions of agency and responsibility, mushrooms and microbes, eighteenth-century pornography and the French Revolution. Klara studied at Glasgow University, Oxford University and Guildhall. She was born into a Greek and Polish family in Germany.

Jelle Cauwenberghs

Jelle Cauwenberghs is a poet and translator currently based in Glasgow, where he daylights as a bookseller. He is a regular contributor to Caught by the River and is working on a chapbook and a novel. He can be found on twitter. He loves to write about misshapen things, things that are out of place or placeless.

S. P. Hannaway

S. P. Hannaway is drawn to the weird and wonderful. His first story appeared in Litro Online in 2014. Since then his work has cropped up in journals such as Dream Catcher, Brittle Star, Lighthouse, The Incubator, Neon and The Interpreter’s House. He recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. He’s worked as an actor (in a previous life) and now lives in London.

David Redford Palmer

David Redford Palmer is a Glaswegian photographer who concentrates on the details of nature. The resultant images are abstract, painterly forms, universal patterns, or the fractal essence of natural systems. His photography is a kind of meditation, mindful and alert. If the devil is in the detail, then so too, surely, is the celestial.

Michael Uhall

Michael Uhall is a political theorist and an aficionado of horror and weird prose. He finished his PhD in political science in 2019, and he is currently writing two novels. One is about a revolution on a cruise ship, and the other is a psychogeographical horror story about the bleakness at the heart of American historical experience.

Shane Jesse Christmass

Shane Jesse Christmass is the author of the novels, Xerox Over Manhattan (Apocalypse Party, 2019), Belfie Hell (Inside The Castle, 2018), Yeezus In Furs (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018), Napalm Recipe: Volume One (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017), Police Force as A Corrupt Breeze (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2016) and Acid Shottas (The Ledatape Organisation, 2014). He was a member of the band Mattress Grave and is currently a member in Snake Milker. shanejessechristmass.tumblr.com | instagram.com/sjxsjc | twitter.com/sjxsjc

Rachel Frances Sharpe

Rachel Frances Sharpe is an artist and researcher based in Glasgow. She graduated from The Glasgow School of Art MFA programme in 2017. Recent exhibitions include ‘How Strange When an Illusion Dies’ (Leith Theatre, 2018), ‘POKEY HAT’ (New Glasgow Society, Glasgow International 2016) and ‘Who Owns the Cone?’ (Likky Ruth Project Space, 2016). Moving image work has been screened at Deep Trash Romance (Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, 2018) and the Fluid Physicalities Conference (Birkbeck University, 2017). In March 2019 she launched a new curatorial moving image project titled Point exploring the queer potentiality of the horror film genre.

Ema Pina

Ema Pina is a London-based painter. Her artworks reconcile analytical observations of surface and interiority, by interweaving aspects of longing with the representation of artefacts, nature and the body. Her visual lexicon speaks, in riddles, of fictions within reality, the embodiment of sentience and the agency of idleness. Pina also writes musings on the processes of writing, thinking and feeling. Born in Portugal, she graduated in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (UAL), London, in 2014 and has exhibited regularly since then, with shows including Through a Screen Darkly at Sensei Gallery, London, and The Future is Female, at La Porte Peinte, Noyers, France. Curatorial projects include Here then, was I / Here now, am I and Void Feelers, both at Thames-Side Studios Gallery in London. Her work was awarded the Kate Barton Award in 2014, the Brian Botting Prize and the Clyde & Co Art Award Collection in 2015, and the Eaton Fund in 2019. emapina.com

Klara Kofen

Klara Kofen writes, makes films, directs, designs and builds costumes and sets out of discarded materials. She is the Artistic Director of Waste Paper Opera, a London based experimental music theatre and performance collective. Occasionally, she investigates international trade shows. Her work is influenced by her research into the impact new technologies have on notions of agency and responsibility, mushrooms and microbes, eighteenth-century pornography and the French Revolution. Klara studied at Glasgow University, Oxford University and Guildhall. She was born into a Greek and Polish family in Germany.

Stephen O’Donnell

Stephen O’Donnell is based in Dublin and has had stories published in Typehouse Magazine, Strange Horizons and Five on the Fifth, among others. stephenmodonnell.wixsite.com/steodo

Charles J March III

Charles J March III is an asexual and neurodivergent Navy hospital corpsman veteran, who is currently trying to live an eclectic life with an interesting array of recovering creatures, in Orange County, CA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Evergreen Review, Atlas Obscura, Litro, the Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, Lalitamba, 3:AM Magazine, Fleas on the Dog, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Taco Bell Quarterly, Storm Cellar, Harbinger Asylum, BlazeVOX, Bareknuckle Poet, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Beatnik Cowboy, Points in Case, Stinkwaves, The Writing Disorder, Literary Orphans, Otoliths, Oddball Magazine, amongst others. In 2020 he was a prize-winner in Blood Tree Literature’s Chimera Hybrid Contest. linkedin.com/in/charles-j-march-iii-4114b5b2 | soundcloud.com/charles-john-march-iii

Annie Schoonover

Annie Schoonover is a Minnesota native who recently graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, with a major in Creative Writing as well as minors in English and Theatre. Her work has previously appeared in Barnstorm Journal and The Poet magazine and is forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine. twitter.com/AnnieSchoonover

Conor Baird

Conor Baird is an artist who was born and raised in Glasgow, where he is now based. By showing work in galleries and festivals, as well as sewers, he seeks to intimately unpack, and make a mess of, personal narratives around intimacy, shame, belonging and violence. With performance, film and installation Baird uses subversive dramaturgies and selected materials, to collage an unmonumental ‘queer actionism’. Recently, thanks to inaction and reflection during lockdown, this collaging has slid into more formalised approaches to publishing. He studied BA(Hons) Sculpture at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, graduating in 2013, participated in the alternative postgraduate programme, Syllabus III, in 2018, and completed his MLitt in Theatre and Performance Practices at University of Glasgow in 2019. conorbaird.com

Hailey Piper

Hailey Piper is a transgender speculative writer, and author of ‘The Worm and His Kings’ and ‘Benny Rose, the Cannibal King’. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, and her short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, The Arcanist, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, among others. haileypiper.com | twitter.com/HaileyPiperSays

Sally O’Reilly

Sally O’Reilly writes for voice, page and screen, and makes performances for galleries, conferences, and opera houses, as well as open-air swimming pools, bathing machines and train tabletops. She savours complications that involve infrastructure, technology, voice and psycho-social encounter. Longer fictional works include the operas And London Burned (Temple Music Foundation, 2016) and The Virtues of Things (Royal Opera, Aldeburgh Music, Opera North, 2015); the novella The Ambivalents (Cabinet, New York, 2017) and the novel Crude (Eros Press, 2016). She is also the head barkeeper of The Open Arms online pub.

Ignacio Evangelista

Ignacio Evangelista is a Spanish photographer, with a degree in psychology, based in Madrid. His photographic series show the relationship between nature and the artificial. By connecting his images with the human trace Evangelista focusses on places, or situations, where something seems contradictory. He has exhibited in the US, Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, UK, Hungary and Spain; his images have also been featured on CNN International and ARTE TV Channel, as well as in The Independent, POLKA Magazine, L’Oeil de la Photographie, Citylab-The Atlantic, Der Spiegel, VICE, The European, Haaretz, ArchDaily, Domus Magazine, La Repubblica, El País Semanal and El Periódico de Cataluña, among others. ignacioevangelista.com

Mauricio Montiel Figueiras

Mauricio Montiel Figueiras was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1968. Based in Mexico City he is a writer of prose fiction, essays and poetry, and works as a translator, editor and film and literary critic. His work has been published in magazines and newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Italy, Peru, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has been Resident Writer for the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in England (2003) and The Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy (2008). In 2012 he was appointed Resident Writer for the prestigious Hawthornden Retreat for Writers in Scotland. In 2020 he was appointed Resident Writer for the Saari Residence in Finland.

Omer Wissman

Omer Wissman is a 36-year-old single and asexual multidisciplinary artist, currently living on disability due to a comorbidity of mental health disorders. He narrowly escaped high school but not junior high. After proving too odd for even the oddest job, he went to university on an SAT scholarship and barely graduated from the psychology and music departments, albeit with some honours. His soul was at last, partially saved by a 27^th birthday gift: a book of prose poems that opened up a life of writing – from drama to kid-lit. After exhausting local publishing opportunities with a poem printed on a column at the country’s oldest and weirdest mall, Wissman returned to the English of his angry lyrics’ youth, and since then has had texts published by PopMatters, Sensitive Skin and Serotonin, among others.

Colin James

Colin James has a couple of chapbooks of poetry published, Dreams of The Really Annoying, from Writing Knights Press, and A Thoroughness Not Deprived of Absurdity, from Piski’s Porch Press, and has published a book of poems, Resisting Probability, from Sagging Meniscus Press.

David Romanda

David Romanda lives in Kawasaki City, Japan. His work has appeared in Ambit Magazine, Magma, The Moth, Poetry Ireland Review, and Popshot Quarterly. Romanda’s chapbook, I’m Sick of Pale Blue Skies, is slated for publication in Spring 2021.

Jack Lawton

Jack Lawton is a writer of fiction and essays. His work has been included in The Mouldy Bike and the Inniu, Inné, Amarach collection. He currently works as a writer in the video-game industry in Galway, Ireland. twitter.com/_jacklawton_

Amanda Minkkinen

Amanda Minkkinen is a sociology student at the University of Copenhagen and a writer of short fiction and poetry. She has work in Mycelia, Odd Magazine and Wu-Wei Fashion Mag. twitter.com/aljminkkinen | instagram.com/aljminkkinen

Frank Roger

Frank Roger was born in 1957 in Ghent, Belgium. With his first story appearing in 1975, he now has several hundred short stories to his credit, published in more than forty languages, including Scots and Scottish Gaelic. In 2012 a story collection in English, The Burning Woman and Other Stories, was published in Ireland by Evertype. As well as writing fiction he produces collages and visual art, in a surrealist and satirical tradition, which have also appeared in various magazines and books.

William Joys

William Joys was born in Slough in 1989 and is based in London. As an artist working in performance, he uses writing, in the form of song, and sculpture, in the form of costume, to develop characters based on the symbolism of objects, encounters and architecture. Twinned with his own objectification he implicates himself within a shifting authoritarianism that is at times, masculine, feminine, androgynous and derived from both the animate and inanimate. In other words: if Shirley Bassey were a lighthouse, she’d be William Joys. Recent performances include a tour of William Joys: A One Man Show at Kunstraum London UK, Kunsthalle Münster, Münster DE and Kunsthalle Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg DE.  www.williamjoys.co.uk

Trahearne Falvey

Trahearne Falvey is a writer and teacher from the South Coast of England. His criticism has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Entropy and Sabotage Reviews, and his fiction has appeared in Mycelia, Molotov Cocktail and Short Fiction Journal, among others. He won the Aurora Prize for Short Fiction in 2020. twitter.com/TrahearneF

Ryan J Smith

Ryan J Smith is a Glaswegian author, screenwriter and musician based in Margate. @mermaids_music & @more_ritual_reads