The Artist and the Ethics

Dr Sanah Ahsan is an award-winning poet, clinical psychologist, presenter, and educator. Her work is centred on compassion, troubling our colonial understandings of mental health, and embracing each other’s madness. Her psychological practice is rooted in liberation and community psychology, drawing on therapeutics, poetics, and post-activism as interconnected practices to support racialised and marginalised people. Her published research explores the deconstruction of whiteness within UK clinical psychology. Some of Sanah’s media work includes presenting a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary exploring the over-medicalisation of young people’s distress and giving a TED Talk entitled ‘Rewriting my story with love and poetry as a queer muslim’. Sanah won the Outspoken Poetry Performance Prize and was recently shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and White Review Poetry Prize. Sanah’s poetry has been published in several anthologies.

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. His second collection After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize, along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year.
In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. His poetry collection Heritage Aesthetics was published by Granta in 2022.

Jeremy Noel-Tod teaches in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at University of East Anglia. He has reviewed poetry for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Daily Telegraph, and was the poetry critic for The Sunday Times from 2013 to 2021. He has edited the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013), the Complete Poems (2015) of R.F. Langley, and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018). He writes a weekly poetry newsletter at Some Flowers Soon.

Nikita Gill is a writer, artist and graphic designer. Author of Your Soul is a River, Wild Embers and Fierce Fairytales. She is a National Poetry Day ambassador and has published multiple anthologies with poetry based on retelling stories from folklore and mythology.