Diversity and Representation in Writing

Join our panel, featuring Damien Mosely, founder of Indie Novella, a non-profit independent publisher, bookseller and social enterprise devoted to publishing new and under-represented authors; Catherine Menon, novelist and member of The Whole Kahani project, a collective of British South Asian writers; and Lola Olufemi, a writer, researcher and lecturer whose work focuses on black feminism and radical social movements.

Our panel will be asking: how much change has there really been in the last ten years, in terms of platforming global majority, queer, working-class and disabled writers? What should writers from minoritised backgrounds know as they set out on literary or publishing careers; and how can they work with other minoritised writers to build community and networks of support and solidarity?

Dr. Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer, researcher and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. Her writing has been published by Afterall Journal, Architectural Review, Wasafiri, Stenberg Press, Aperture, La Fabrique Editions, Arcadia Missa, Vittles, Extra Extra Magazine and others. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (2026) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. She occasionally curates and is a member of the organising team at the Feminist Library based in Peckham. She is represented by Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander Associates.

Catherine Menon is the author of Fragile Monsters, published in 2021 by Viking and shortlisted for the Society of Authors Gordon Bowker Prize and the Authors' Club First Novel Award. Her debut short story collection, Subjunctive Moods, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018. She has a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in creative writing from City University, for which she won the annual prize. She’s won or been placed in a number of competitions, including the Fish, Bridport, London Short Story, Bare Fiction, Willesden Herald, Asian Writer, Leicester Writes, Winchester Writers Festival and Short Fiction Journal awards. Her work has been published in a number of literary journals, including The Good Journal and Asian Literary Review and has been broadcast on radio. She is part of the Whole Kahani, a collective of British South Asian writers.

Damien Mosley is the founder of Indie Novella. Indie Novella is a non-profit independent publisher, bookseller and social enterprise devoted to publishing new and under-represented authors. He is also an author and teaches on the Indie Novella writing course.