Room 204
2025-26 Cohort
We are delighted to introduce our Room 204 Writers Development Programme 2025-2026 intake, which met in person at the Writing West Midlands offices in April 2025:
Lucy Andrew
Lucy Andrew is a crime writer and crime fiction scholar who has an unhealthy fixation with Jane Austen. Her debut novel, A Very Vexing Murder – a cosy crime retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma featuring con-woman-turned-detective Harriet Smith – will be published by Corvus (Atlantic Books) in the UK and William Morrow (HarperCollins) in the US in early 2026.
Louise Aust
Louise Aust loves creating immersive worlds with a strong sense of place, where unsettling things happen to (usually) female protagonists. Her writing – spanning novels, short stories, and scripts – often explores womanhood, queerness, magic, and folklore. Originally from Oswestry, she studied English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham and now lives in Wolverhampton. When she’s not writing, she’s either lifting weights, reading, curating playlists, or watching WWE.
Faduma-Zahra M. Gure
Faduma-Zahra M. Gure is a writer from Birmingham. She writes both poetry and prose. She is currently working on her first novel which tells a story set in and inspired by Birmingham’s culturally diverse inner-city communities.
Abigail Johnson
Abigail Johnson is an author from Birmingham whose stories have been longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and Exeter Novel Award and shortlisted for the Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction. Although her primary school teacher predicted she would grow up to be an author, it was only in her forties that she decided to take writing seriously. Her debut novel, The Secret Collector, is set in Birmingham and is an uplifting and warm story about friendship across generations, the power of community and finding hope where it had been lost. It was published by PanMacmillan in April 2025 and Abigail’s second novel will be out in 2026. She has a background in communications and marketing and is an Assistant Writer for the Spark Young Writer’s programme.
Helen Loney
Helen is an archaeologist and writer who emigrated from California thirty years ago. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is old enough to remember Sunnyvale before Silicon Valley. Raised on H. P. Lovecraft and Dorothy L. Sayers, she gravitates towards historical fiction with ‘outsider’ protagonists, including an 1880’s ‘wild west’ sheriff now a police inspector with the London Metropolitan Police Service. She has plans for thriller set in on the Berkeley Campus, in the Beat era, which draws from her own childhood in the early 1960s in the Bay Area. She also occasionally writes ‘werewolf porn’, as well as archaeology.
Carol Lucas
Carol works in medical communications and lives in Burton on Trent with her husband, two children and her very spoiled cat. She is a Derby County season ticket holder and sets herself an annual challenge of watching 100 different films at the cinema. Having previously written several (so far unpublished) fantasy novels, she is currently working on a sci-fi which she describes as The Count of Monte Cristo in space. As part of a poetry collective, her poems were displayed in an exhibition in Wales in 2024 and in 2019 she was longlisted for the Bath Novel Prize.
Lucy Marcovitch
Lucy Marcovitch is a lecturer at Coventry University and a freelance education writer. She has had two picture books published and performed her work in schools, libraries and at open mic events. Her education writing has been commissioned by public bodies, charities and NGOs, including the BBC, the children’s publisher Nosy Crow and for the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games. Lucy is currently focussing on memoir and life-writing, exploring how different forms can be used to tell ordinary people’s extraordinary stories. Lucy uses running to free up her writing ideas. She started learning Spanish during lockdown, hoping to one day be fluent enough to travel around South America.
Francesca Millican-Slater
Francesca is a writer and performer. She was part of the 2024 BFI Stories to Shorts cohort writing short film script Floating Gold. Francesca’s theatre shows have been produced and commissioned by Birmingham Rep (Forensics of a Flat, Stories to Tell in the Middle of the Night) New Vic Stoke (Gold!) & HLF Funding Bid Pity of War (My Dearest Girls. Stories To Tell was developed into a series of BSL videos, bookwork and podcast. Francesca has been commissioned by Duckie & Fierce Festival (Princess Promenade) The National Trust (Blossom Projects, 2022- 2025). Francesca is currently focused on writing for the page.
Ken Preston
Ken Preston is an author and workshop leader based in the West Midlands. He writes thrillers, horror, and adventure novels for both adults and young people, often blending real-world grit with pulpy, cinematic flair. Alongside his fiction, Ken runs creative writing workshops in schools across the UK, inspiring children and teenagers to find their voice through storytelling. He also works as a freelance copy editor, supporting other writers on their publishing journeys. You can find out more about his books, workshops, and writing life at writingintheshadows.com.
Poppy Kamel Sall
Poppy wrote her first novel, a psychological thriller, while working as a lawyer. Since then, she has completed an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD on using historical fiction to tell previously unheard stories. Her novel SEPOY is a modern interpretation of WW1 recounting the Indian experience of the war. She has co-written and self-published a children’s book on Indian suffragette, Sophia Duleep Singh. Poppy has taught creative writing to both undergraduates and postgraduates and runs workshops at literary and arts festivals. When not writing Poppy is busy crocheting or attempting to work out yoga poses.
Ronin Sansara
Ronin Sansara is a storyteller, creator, and artist passionate about amplifying underrepresented voices and pushing creative boundaries. A recipient of two Faber writing scholarships, an Arvon grant and a TV Foundation bursary, his ‘story-first’ approach revolves around identity, humanity and the minority experience. His passion for storytelling extends to the stage and screen, working with Birmingham Hippodrome’s CRAFT and BBC Studios on their Assistant Director programme for flagship drama productions. He is currently developing a gripping book-club novel and several thought-provoking scripts for Film, TV & Theatre.
Carinya Sharples
Carinya Sharples is a writer and facilitator from South East London now living in Birmingham. Her creative and journalistic work has been published by The London Reader, adda stories, BBC World Service, The Guardian, among others. She was longlisted in Mslexia’s 2022 Short Story Competition and shortlisted for a Rebel Women Lit Caribbean Reader’s Award in 2020. She is pursuing a PhD at the University of Leicester, exploring mixedness in Guyanese literature, while teaching part-time. She has led creative-writing workshops for Spread the Word, Poetry vs Colonialism, London Libraries, Middleground magazine and others. In 2020, she co-edited the anthology Inspire: Exciting Ways of Teaching Creative Writing.
Ruth Stacey
Ruth Stacey is a writer from Worcestershire. Her latest collection, Feel Everything! is the imagined memoirs of the illustrator and tarot artist Pamela Colman Smith (Knives, Forks &Spoons 2025). Previous poetry collections include Queen, Jewel, Mistress (Eyewear 2015) and I, Ursula (V.Press 2021). Stacey has also published pamphlets with Knives, Forks & Spoons: The Dark Room (2021) a duet with photographer Krista Kay, Viola, the Virgin Queen, with illustrator Desdemona McCannon, and How to Wear Grunge, a poetry memoir. Stacey’s poetry collection with Katy Wareham Morris won Best Collaborative Work in the 2018 Saboteur Awards. Stacey is currently working (very slowly) on a new poetry pamphlet based on Venice and editing her fantasy novel. Her next project is book two of fantasy series, and a collection of folk horror short stories. She works as a lecturer at the University of Worcester. Website: ruthstacey.com
Oscar Stainton
The wonders of the natural world and its prehistoric life inspired Oscar’s reading passions since childhood. As a teenager, the history and mythologies of Europe and Mexico instilled a desire to visit these times and places through imagination and writing. This was first expressed by writing a high fantasy epic inspired by Early Medieval history. Aberystwyth University gave Oscar the chance to write in genres from crime thriller to science fiction, attaining a Merit in his Master’s Degree in English & Creative Writing. His degree’s short story formed the basis for his sci-fi adventure take on the lost world genre.
Eleanor Trigg
Eleanor Trigg is a writer and timber frame building designer from Birmingham. Her short fiction has been published in Lucent Dreaming, Seaside Gothic, and the Floodgate Press anthology ‘Night Time Economy’. Though not averse to writing about buildings or timber, she usually finds joy in exploring the interior lives of characters, history, myth, and the strange. She is a graduate of the Faber Academy and is working on her first novel.
