British Author

Patrice Lawrence is an award-winning British writer of books for children and young people. She is currently working with the UK charity Booktrust on increasing the ethnic diversity of children's writers and illustrators. Patrice worked in the UK charity sector for over twenty years on projects and policy initiatives promoting social justice, anti-discrimination and elevating the voices of marginalised communities.

University College London

Melanie Ramdarshan Bold is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at University College London, where she teaches and researches topics related to Publishing/Book Cultures. Her main research interest centres on the contemporary history of authorship, publishing, and reading, with a focus on children's and YA books. Palgrave Macmillan published Melanie's book Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom in 2019.

Newcastle University

​Aishwarya Subramanian is a researcher from New Delhi, India, working in the fields of children’s literature, spatiality, popular genre and post-imperial British studies. She holds a BA in English literature from Lady Sri Ram College, Delhi University (2007), an M. Phil in Popular fiction from Trinity College, Dublin (2009) and a PhD from Newcastle University (2017). Her PhD examined the effects of decolonisation upon narrative spatiality in mid-twentieth-century British children’s fantasy. Her most recent project “Networked Voices: Connecting BAME Activism in Children’s Literature,” investigated and visualised networks of antiracist activism in contemporary British children’s literature.