The Lost Art of Kindness

Lemn Sissay OBE is a poet playwright, memoirist performer and broadcaster. Lemn Sissay was named MBE for services to literature by The Queen in 2014. In 2021 he named OBE for services to Literature and Charity. He has honorary doctorates from Universities of Huddersfield, Manchester, Brunel, Kent and Essex. Lemn has been Chancellor of University since 2015. He has judged many literary competitions including 2020 Booker Prize, The Gold Man Booker Awards, The National Poetry Competition, The Forward Prize, The Ted Hughes Prize, Cardiff International poetry competition, The Creative Future Literary Awards, and the Bridport Prize. He lives in London and Manchester.

Chitra Ramaswamy is an author and journalist. Her latest book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship (Canongate) is a work of creative non-fiction exploring her friendship with a German Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor called Henry Wuga. It won the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was included in The Guardian’s top memoirs and biographies of 2022. Her first book, Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy (Saraband) won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award, was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, and was reissued in spring 2024. She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi:ble, and Message from the Skies and produced a book of micro-essays, Rich Things, for the Alasdair Gray Archive. She writes for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, broadcasts for BBC radio, and is currently working on her third book. She is from London and lives in Edinburgh.