Talk, Literature

Edinburgh Writers' Forum

October Meeting

(Tue 11 Oct: 7pm)

Join us for the next Edinburgh Writers' Forum when we’ll be welcoming guest speakers Maisie Chan and Helen Sedgwick.

Maisie Chan is children's author whose debut novel Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths won the Jhalak Prize and the Branford Boase Award in 2022. Her latest novel Keep Dancing, Lizzie Chu is out now with Piccadilly Press. She also writes the Tiger Warrior series under the name M. Chan. She has written early readers for Hachette and Big Cat Collins and has a collection of myths and legends out with Scholastic. She runs the Bubble Tea Writers Network to support and encourage writers of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) descent in the UK. Maisie will discuss diversity in fiction and the importance and use of sensitivity readers.

Helen Sedgwick is a multi-genre author and former research physicist who writes about human connection across time and space, juxtaposing science with the unknowable and realism with ghost story. Her debut The Comet Seekers was selected as a Best Book of 2016 by The Herald and her scifi The Growing Season was shortlisted for the Scottish Fiction Book of the Year. Most recently she has written The Burrowhead Mysteries a folk horror crime trilogy. Helen was awarded the Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship in 2021 to write an interplanetary series about rebuilding after environmental collapse and finding hope through quantum entanglement. Helen will be speaking about author resilience, which is so critical in an increasingly difficult publishing landscape.