Anna Dreda

Anna Dreda was at the helm of Wenlock Books for thirty years, where she ran reading groups, founded the Wenlock Poetry Festival, and even (in the Harry Potter heyday) took 300 children on a midnight steam train ride on the Severn Valley Railway to collect their latest book! In her retirement she continues with her lifelong passion for books and poetry, especially in bringing poetry to people who don’t know they love it yet.

Anna and her granddaughter host the Children’s Poetry Club at the Poetry Pharmacy; Anna hosts four seasonal Poetry Breakfasts a year at the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop’s Castle, and leads a Christmas and Easter Poetry Reading at St Cuthbert’s Church, Clungunford.

John Rux-Burton

John Rux-Burton is an author, artist and researcher whose work explores how people make meaning through the very act of searching for it. His work ranges from humorous literary fiction, poetry, fine-art photography, popular writing about landscape, and rigorous research in topogenesthetics: how places acquire meaning and act upon human perception. This enquiry has led to his multidisciplinary study of the prehistory of the Walton Basin. 

John studied English at Oxford, where he won the Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize; his photography has been exhibited internationally. He has also created The Welsh Marches Japanese Garden: Where the Whale Talks to the Stars, an art garden in Kington that brings his theories of perception into dialogue with Japanese and Western landscape. His bilingual photographic book, From the Marches to the Sea, explores the landscapes of Mid-Wales. In 2009, he was awarded the Silver Atenier Medal by Technische Universität Darmstadt. Aged eight, he received a Silver Blue Peter badge—an achievement he has yet to surpass.

 Julie Brominicks

By sharing her passion for the landscape, people, wildlife, culture and languages she encounters on the road, Julie Brominicks aims to generate excitement for slow and sustainable travel. Her writing is informed by her previous career in environmental education.

She is the author of The Edge of Cymru (Seren Books, 2022) and contributes to publications including BBC Countryfile Magazine and Nation Cymru. As a Welsh learner she champions Cymru, Cymraeg and cymreictod. Her second book Cader Idris: Let the Mountain Speak is forthcoming in September 2026.

Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet, literary biographer and writer about place. A former professional violinist, she has a PhD in applied philosophy of language and is presently Senior Research Fellow, Harris Manchester College University of Oxford.

Fiona’s more than 30 books range from poetry collections to academic monographs by way of edited anthologies, book-length writing about life and place, and biographies of Romantic figures. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Roehampton.Her work has been translated into 38 languages, and been honoured with international prizes in the US, Bosnia, India, France, Albania and North Macedonia, as well as in the UK, where it has also received critical acclaim and numerous Book of the Year commendations.

Charlie Walker

Charlie Walker is an award-winning explorer, author and international keynote speaker. He has travelled over 60,000 miles by foot, horse, raft, bicycle, ski and dugout canoe, in places as varied as the Tibetan plateau, the Mongolian steppe, the Congolese jungle, the Arctic tundra, the highlands of New Guinea and the Sahara desert. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a Scientific Exploration Society Explorer Award winner.

Megan Hayes

Megan Hayes is a writer-researcher- facilitator and a relentless optimist. She is the author of five books; some translated into multiple languages. Her creative non-fiction was shortlisted for the Laurie Lee Prize in 2024. Megan has taught creative writing for many years, helping to set up the UK’s first online MA Creative Writing and Wellbeing. She currently tutors on the MA Creative Writing (Online) for the University of Hull, as well as facilitating writing for wellbeing sessions in her local community. After travelling and swimming around the world, Megan now lives in Bristol with one husband and several houseplants.

Maya Jordan

‘A curse on being ordinary! Wrong is not her name. Her name is Maya Jordan. She is a noisy woman, and we should fear her’ Michael Sheen

Maya is a working-class writer living in Mid-Wales. With a Masters in Creative writing from The Open University, she writes fiction and creative non-fiction, as well as Children’s stories. She’s scared of writing poetry so doesn’t do that. In 2021 she was a A Writing Chance Award winner – a programme supporting working-class and under-represented writers. With Michael Sheen and New Writing North her fiction was recently performed by Michael Sheen in the BBC Radio Wales Margins to Mainstream.

Her work has been published online and in print, including in Folding Rock The New Statesman and a fortnightly column in the Daily Mirror’s Lemon-Aid newsletter. A storyteller, she has performed her stories for children and adults in libraries, schools and festivals as well as The House of Commons.

Mike Parker

Mike Parker is a British travel writer, living near Machynlleth in mid Wales. He grew up in Kidderminster, Worcestershire and graduated in 1989 in English and Drama from Westfield College, University of London. He was the co-author of the Rough Guide to Wales, and has also written books on four British cities, and on the gay scenes of Scotland, Ireland and Northern England. In addition, Parker has worked as a stand-up comedian.

Since 2007, he has concentrated on writing narrative non-fiction books that start from a profound sense of place. Author and broadcaster Horatio Clare said of him, “A kind of mini-biography of the British psyche emerges from Parker’s work, its learning lightly worn and its tales well told, full of interest and incident.” His 2009 book Map Addict became a bestseller; reviewed in The Daily Telegraph as “this excellent book on the pleasures of maps and navigation, which is also a withering attack on the infantilisation of the satnav age.”

His 2019 book On the Red Hill won the non-fiction Wales Book of the Year for 2020, and was Highly Commended for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing.

Louis D. Hall

After growing up in Scotland, Louis D. Hall went on a trip to northern Mongolia, aged 18, in search of the Tsaatan tribe. It was on this trek that he first encountered the connecting powers of the horse. He then embarked upon a 1147-mile ride down the length of the UK, which raised money for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and laid the foundation for The Big Hoof, a Scottish mental health charity that creates long distance rides.

Since his 110-day journey across Europe with Sasha, Louis has been working for NGO Insulate Ukraine. He lives between Kyiv, Oxford and Amsterdam.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch is a British-Welsh poet, performer, tutor and editor who lives close to the sea in West Wales where she tends an orchard and runs a writers’ retreat. Her previous poetry collections with Picador, Not in These Shoes and Banjo, were each shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year.

Milk Wood Memoir is a startling and luminous collection from one of Wales’s most gifted living poets.

‘Wynne-Rhydderch’s poetry masters a variety of styles, is intelligent, sincere, and deeply human. How lucky we are to have a guide like her’ – Matthew Dickman

Bethany Handley

Bethany Handley is an award-winning writer, poet and disability activist from South Wales. Named one of the UK’s ten most influential disabled people in politics, law, and media by the Shaw Trust 2024, she campaigns for disability rights and better access to nature. An ambassador for Country Living’s Access for All, Wales Coast Path, and Ramblers Cymru, her debut poetry pamphlet Cling Film was published by Seren in 2025.

Bethany co-edited Beyond / Tu Hwnt, a ground-breaking bilingual anthology of Welsh Deaf and disabled writers. Her work has been featured by BBC One, BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 4, the Poetry Foundation, Country Living, The Guardian and more.

Professor Keith Ray

Professor Keith Ray, MBE, FSA, MCIfA. Keith Ray started out in field archaeology in Britain fifty-six years ago. His first degree (in archaeology and anthropology) was obtained at Cambridge University in 1977. He studied and worked in West African archaeology (PhD, also at Cambridge University) between 1976 and 1988). From 1986 to 2014 he worked in conservation advisory services, mostly in local government in England (chief archaeologist successively in Oxfordshire, Plymouth and Herefordshire). In 2019 he was appointed Honorary Professor in Archaeology at Cardiff University, and since 2024 he has worked part-time as Senior Research Fellow on the ‘Making the March’ Leverhulme Trust funded research project.

He is the author of The Archaeology of Herefordshire: An Exploration (Logaston Press, 2015), lead author of Offa’s Dyke: Landscape and Hegemony in Eighth Century Britain and co-author (with Julian Thomas) of Neolithic Britain: the transformation of social worlds