I’m Jan, sometimes Janette but always J.M. on my books. If they’re in bookshops, they’re in the 9 -12 section, so anyone can read them – I have readers of all ages! My flagship books, ‘The Wonder Girls’ are about a 1930s girl gang rescuing kids in peril. The peril is provided by the ‘Blackshirts’, the far right of the day.

I was a teacher, so I love visiting schools and groups to talk about the stories, the history behind them, reading for pleasure, and my writing and publishing journey. I also love running workshops, encouraging new writers, helping them to make their work more active and immersive. I live in Southampton.

J. N. Fox is of Caribbean descent. She was born in Wiltshire and grew up in a small town there. Maternally she is related to Jamaicans who fought for Britain in both the first and second world wars. She lives in Oxford with her husband and writes full-time.

She has featured in the Sunday Times. Been the subject of a BBC Documentary and has written content for The Times and Telegraph.
She is the author of The Battle of Ignorance trilogy. Three Voices, Nine Night and Two Ladies. A fictional series of contemporary literary novels that deal with integration and interracial relationships. Using fun relatable characters, she raises awareness of topical issues.

Sylvia named Coopers Oxford Marmalade Factory, ‘the Jam Factory’ when she established an Art and Antiques Centre with café, bookshop and repair services. The name has stuck! She’s best known locally for the ten year Oxford Castaway series in The Oxford Times. It brought together people who would usually never meet and she made it diverse which was rare then. Her novel, Sculpting the Elephant, is half set in Jericho and half in India. Sylvia is a campaigner for libraries and recently, with friends and the help of Korky Paul raised the money to build the first community library in west Kenya where her novel Not so Black and White is partly set. Her best-selling Brushstrokes in Time is a historical novel which tells the story of the courageous Stars artists (Beijing 1979). Her memoir has been endorsed by the journalist, Yasmin Alibhai Brown, the international poet Sudeep Sen and the history professor, Rana Mitter (Oxford and Harvard).

Peter Tickler is an established writer of crime fiction, mostly set in and around Oxford. He has been much praised for the authenticity of his Oxford (‘a wonderful gift of creating geographically factual settings for his fictional characters’ – Oxford Times) as well as the pace of his stories (‘deliciously thrilling and wildly unpredictable’ – Oxford Today).

He studied classics at Keble College, and later settled with his wife and family in South Oxford. He worked in the IT dept of the Potato Marking Board in Between Towns Road, and from the computer room he looked down into the carpark of the Cowley police station. So it was inevitable that his irascible protagonist DI Susan Holden was based there. He loves setting his crimes in places he knows, and describes himself as ‘town, not gown’.

His latest (and 10th) crime story is Death in the Sea Pool, set in Bude where he has spent many off-season holidays. He insists that ‘sometimes I need a change of scene!’.

He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, and gives talks at festivals, libraries, U3As, Women’s Institutes and even at one of His Majesty’s Prisons. (They let him out eventually!).

His great-grandfather founded Tickler’s Jam Company, which supplied jam to the British troops and became a household name in the First World War. This was the inspiration for his novel The Tickler’s Jam Murders.

Peter Lovesey (winner of 3 CWA daggers) emailed him: “I was bamboozled by the solution to the puzzle. Bravo.”

Father and daughter have written plays, film scripts, and books together, including memoirs documenting Ray Foulk’s life as creator of the original Isle of Wight Rock Festivals: Stealing Dylan from Woodstock and The Last Great Event. They have recently published their long-awaited novel, Picasso’s Revenge, and Caroline has published her illustrated collection of humorous canine poetry.

Callum M. Brooks is the author of the Rise of Tyrants epic fantasy series. A lifelong fantasy reader, he spent years devouring novels before deciding it was time to bring the stories in his own imagination to life.

That decision became Rise of Tyrants, a project that took over twelve years to complete. The first novel, Whispers of War, was released in March 2025 to widespread praise from readers, followed just twelve months later by the second installment, Tides of an Avalanche. Together, the series has received outstanding reader reviews and is rapidly approaching one million Kindle page reads.

Book Three is currently in development, with publication planned for late 2026 or early 2027.

Set across multiple kingdoms and told through a rich cast of interconnected characters, Rise of Tyrants is a dark epic fantasy grounded in realism, where political intrigue, brutal warfare, impossible choices, and the consequences of ambition shape the fate of nations. As an uneasy peace begins to fracture and an ancient prophecy stirs, every decision has the power to change the world.