Independent Publishers - Bios
Sarah Beal is publisher and editorial director at Muswell Press, the company she co-owns with her sister Kate. Muswell Press is a small independent, publishing biography, crime, contemporary fiction and lgbtq titles. Sarah was a director of a Bloomsbury Publishing for over 20 years where she worked with authors from Margaret Atwood to JK Rowling, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to Khaled Hosseni.
Kadija Sesay is a Sierra Leonean/British scholar and literary activist. She is the founder/publisher of SABLE LitMag. She works with a broad range of publishers – independent and international brands as an author and editor. She is the co-director of Inscribe Writers Development Programme for Peepal Tree Press where she commissions anthologies, such as Glimpse, a Black British speculative fiction anthology. She is the editor of several other anthologies including Encounters with Baldwin (Aurora Metro). She has published her own poetry, short stories and essays, the latest in New
Daughters of Africa. Her poetry collection is Irki; her forthcoming collection, The Modern Pan-Africanist’s Journey. She is co-founder of Mboka Festival of Arts Culture and Sport and founder of the AfriPoeTree app and founder of the International Black Speculative Writers Festival. She is on the board of African Studies Association (UK) and co-chair of Yaram Arts. She has judged several writing competitions and is the resident judge for the SI Leeds Literary Prize. She has received awards and fellowships for her work in the creative arts.
Keshini Naidoo is the Co-Founder and Publishing Director of Hera. Having started her career at Waterstones and Book Club Associates, she was one of the founder members of staff at Avon/HarperCollins before moving to Darley Anderson Literary Agency and then Bookouture.
She co-founded Hera with Lindsey Mooney in 2018, working under the mission statement and guiding principle of being ‘unashamedly commercial, always inclusive’. Hera was acquired by the Canelo Publishing Group in 2021, now a division of Dorling Kindersley. Since Hera’s inception, Keshini has published authors covering a wide range of genres, from psychological thrillers, detective novels and wartime sagas, to commercial series romance and contemporary romcoms.
Umi Sinha’s first novel Belonging (Myriad 2015), set in India and Sussex in the colonial period, was published in the UK, Poland, Portugal and India, and shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the Waverton Good Read Award, among others. Her second novel, The Fallen, set in WWII Italy, is with agent Candida Lacey at Pearlman & Lacey.
Umi has taught creative writing at Sussex and Brighton Universities, and on the Creative Writing Programme at New Writing South and ran an oral storytelling club, The GuestHouse Storytellers, for 16 years. She also runs Writing Clinic, a mentoring service for writers. She is a profiled writer on Writers Mosaic, a showcase of literary voices and cultures set up by the Royal Literary Fund, and is currently a volunteer mentor for writers in Gaza through wearenotnumbers.org