5x15 & WritersMosaic

Ingrid Persaud is a late bloomer to the world of literature. She began her adult life as a lawyer, having studied law at the London School of Economics. She’d always yearned for an artistic life, an ambition which later took her to study fine art at Goldsmiths College and Central St.Martin’s. Her the transformation into a writer followed careers as an academic teaching law at Kings College, London, and later working as a visual artist. Love After Love, her debut novel won both the 2020 Costa First Novel award, the Author’s Club First Book Award 2021 and the Indie Book Award for Fiction 2021. Other prizes include the BBC National Short Story Award, 2018 and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017, with The Sweet Sop, a story exploring harrowing themes of fractured families, death and terminal illness, through the medium of chocolate. Persaud’s work is mostly set in Trinidad and Tobago, where she was born and grew up before relocating to the UK.

Jeffrey Boakye is an author, broadcaster, educator and journalist with a particular interest in issues surrounding race, masculinity, education and popular culture. Originally from Brixton in London, Jeffrey has taught secondary English for fifteen years. He is the author of several books: Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime; Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored; What is Masculinity? Why Does it Matter? And Other Big Questions; Musical Truth: A Musical Journey Through Modern Black Britain; and I Heard What You Said. He is also the co-presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Add to Playlist. He now lives in Yorkshire with his wife and two sons.

Gabriel Gbadamosi is an Irish and Nigerian poet, playwright and critic, and the founding editor of WritersMosaic. His London novel Vauxhall (Telegram, 2013) won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize and Best International Novel at the Sharjah Book Fair. He was the AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow at the Pinter Centre, Goldsmiths in British, European and African performance; a Judith E. Wilson Fellow for creative writing at Cambridge University; and Writer in Residence at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre. His plays include Stop and Search (Arcola Theatre), Eshu’s Faust (Jesus College, Cambridge), Hotel Orpheu (Schaubühne, Berlin), Shango (DNA, Amsterdam) and for radio The Long, Hot Summer of ’76 (BBC Radio 3) which won the first Richard Imison Award. He presented BBC Radio 3’s flagship arts and ideas programme Night Waves.

Paul Mendez is a London-based novelist, essayist and screenwriter. Born in 1982 and raised in the Black Country, the eldest of four children by Jehovah’s Witness parents of second-generation Jamaican heritage, Mendez disassociated himself from the Witnesses while still a teenager, before moving to Kent to study automotive engineering, then London to study acting, leaving both courses before the end of the first year. After reading James Baldwin’s 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone in the summer of 2002, Mendez began keeping a journal, maintaining it while occupied variously as a sex worker, waiter and sometime journalist. Mendez has contributed to Glass, Esquire, The Face, British Vogue, the Times Literary Supplement and the Brixton Review of Books, and his work has been included in anthologies by Goldsboro Books and Daunt Books. In 2020, Dialogue Books published Mendez’s debut novel Rainbow Milk – examining queer, Black British lives from the Windrush generation to the aftermath of the Brexit vote – to critical acclaim, featuring in the Observer’s prestigious Top Ten Debut Novels list for 2020, before being shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. He is currently reading the MA in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Angela Saini is an award-winning journalist and author. She presents radio, podcasts, and television programmes, and her writing has appeared across the world, including in The Financial Times, Wired, and National Geographic. She was a 2022 Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York and was in Berlin in summer 2022 as a resident scholar at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute. Angela's 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science was published to enormous critical acclaim, and became a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hughes Prize, and the Foyles Book of the Year. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong was published in 2017, and has been translated into fourteen languages. In her bold and radical fourth book, The Patriarchs, Angela Saini goes in search of the true roots of gendered oppression, uncovering a complex history of how it first became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present.