Current Members
Matthew Pugh
Matthew joined in 2019. His first novel, Tempered, was released in 2020 to middle grade readers. His poetry has been published in Xylem Literary Magazine, and has regularly written newspaper articles which have appeared in The Alpena News. He is also an alumnus of the Golden Egg Academy.
Being very indecisive, he settled on a multi-faceted bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, Creative Writing, and Computer Science from the University of Michigan. and a graduate degree in teaching those subjects to children. After teaching for ten years in the UK and USA, he now works as a Principal Software Engineer aiming to help improve the impact of charities and government services.
His writing follows a similar track in that he loves bringing disparate things together in new ways and will often play with the boundaries between genres and setting.
vivien Leanne saunders
Viv joined in 2019. Her first novel, Hunting, was released in 2018 for young adult fantasy fans. The post-apocalyptic dystopia RATS hit the shelf in 2019, as did the Riverbed fantasy trilogy: Mire, Tributary and Cascade. Flesh and Wine, a historical novel exploring the conquest of the Aztec empire, was published in 2020. In 2021 Vivien published YA historical fantasy Whispers, the first book in the Call series. The Body Entire, a historical fantasy thriller, was also released earlier this year.
Vivien won the NAWG Writing Magazine Trophy for historical fiction for two consecutive years with Umbra (2020) and Under a Stone Sky (2021). Squeak Squeak! was shortlisted in 2021. She was awarded the Sir Alan Ayckbourn Trophy for theatrical monologue with Ruby Red (2020). Her children’s story The Sackcloth Liar won the Reedsy Prompts contest. Her award-winning works were published in The Write Path (2020).
Helen Ansdell
Queen of the cliffhangers.
joe jacob
The master of mystery. He’s here.
Emma Tennant
Emma has a masters in film studies and an undergraduate in film and creative writing. She mostly writes screenplays, experimenting with genre and style.
Tim Anderson
Writing as Tim Newton Anderson, Tim has had almost 70 short pieces published in a variety of genres and publications since he started writing seriously five years ago. These include several in the MX series of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, anthologies by Belanger Books, PS Publishing’s Parsec magazine, Black Scat’s Typo magazine of avant garde fiction, Emanations, and many more. A full list is on his writing blog and his Amazon author page.
His writing ranges from experimental pieces through fantasy, horror and science fiction to crime.
Starting as a daily newspaper senior journalist and working as a PR and Marketing officer as well as in economic development, e-government, and policy and research he also ran a pub and hotel and ran cabaret nights where he also sang and played guitar and blues harmonica.
He is a member of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics and a number of his stories are in Triple Obscura Two