Eugen Bacon, Cheryl S. Ntumy, and Stephen Embleton

Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen was announced in the Honor List of the Otherwise Fellowships for “doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction.” Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a “sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work.”

Cheryl S. Ntumy is a Ghanaian writer of short fiction and novels of speculative fiction, young adult fiction and romance. Her work has appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine; Apex Magazine; World Literature Today; Best of World SF Vol. 3 and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022, among others. Her work has also been nominated for the Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and the Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship. She is part of the Sauútiverse Collective, which created a shared universe for Afrocentric speculative fiction, and a member of Petlo Literary Arts, an organization that develops and promotes creative writing in Botswana.

Stephen Embleton was born in South Africa and is now a resident in Oxford, after his 2022 academic fellowship at the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Stephen was awarded a literary grant by the Royal Literary Fund in 2024, recognizing the literary merit of his body of work and literature-related activities. Stephen was the editor of The James Currey Anthology 2022, featuring short fiction and non-fiction from the African continent and in the diaspora. Stephen was the editor of the 2023 edition of the posthumously published final novel of Flora Nwapa, The Lake Goddess.