Global Majority and Underrepresented Writers’ Programme

Our inaugural cohort reflects the Programme’s international scope and intersectional ethos, bringing together participants from four continents who, collectively, embody a wide range of racial, gendered, and economic identities. Among them are first-generation university students, queer and disabled writers, carers, and individuals living in political and economically precarious circumstances.

Click on the name of each scholar to read their profiles in full.

Haneefah Armstrong (Pakistan/UK)
A youth worker and writer developing a memoir of essays on Islamic culture, parentlessness, and trauma. Her work explores creative nonfiction’s capacity to be a space of resistance and repair.

Rahul Bishnoi (India)
A theatre-maker and PhD researcher writing a lyrical biography of his mother. Combining poetry, vignettes, and performance, the work explores maternal labour, caste, and emotional inheritance in postcolonial India.

Dr Tembi Charles (Zimbabwe)
A scholar and poet whose nonfiction project explores her parents’ involvement in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, blending national history with personal memory to reflect on colonial disruption and resistance.

Helena De Tiège (Spain)
A multilingual writer and linguist working on a hybrid novel titled Taste, which explores illness, isolation, and resilience through experimental life-writing. Her practice includes fiction, screenwriting, and visual storytelling.

Ethan Hemmati (Scotland/Iran)
A Scottish-Iranian PhD candidate working on an academic monograph that explores adultery in postwar American literature through the lens of life-writing, biography, and literary form.

Noella Moshi (Tanzania)
A transnational writer is developing a collection of autobiographical short stories that reflect on identity, love, and intergenerational trauma. Her writing explores the female psyche, the body, and memory.

Matseliso Motsoane (Lesotho)
A historian and cultural worker whose biographical project focuses on Lesotho’s urban creatives (1950s–1980s). Her work integrates archival material, oral history, and Southern African philosophies of collective humanity.

Satara Uthayakumaran (Australia/Sri Lanka)
Satara is Australia’s 2025 Youth Representative to the UN and writing a book that draws on a national listening tour with young Australians. Her project interweaves testimony, reportage, and personal narrative to address justice, resilience, and youth-led change.

Global Majority writers are defined as:

• Writers who are Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the Global South, and/or have been referred to as ‘ethnic minorities’.

Underrepresented writers are defined as:

• Writers from Black, Asian, or other ethnic minority groups.
• LGBTQ+ writers.
• Writers from socially disadvantaged backgrounds or who identify as working-class.
• Care leavers.
• Writers with disabilities ( i.e. ‘a physical or mental impairment that has long-term negative effects on a person’s ability to carry out normal daily activities’ (Equality Act, 2010) . This can include neurodiversity).
• Immigrants or refugees.

Life-writing is defined as:

• Writing that includes elements of biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries, journals, anthropological data, oral testimony, eye-witness accounts, biopics, plays, spoken word and musical performances, obituaries, scandal sheets, and gossip columns, blogs, and social media such as Tweets and Instagram stories. It is not only a literary or historical specialism but is relevant across the arts and sciences and can involve philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers and anthropologists.
• For examples of life-writing/life-writers, see current/previous event listings.

The Programme aims to create a space to support writers whose stories have long been absent from our bookshelves.
Our brilliant scholars are doing urgent, original work that pushes the limits of what life-writing can do and be.
We’re excited to see these projects take shape, and warmly encourage authors, agents, and publishers to get in touch,
support our scholars, and help bring these vital stories into the world.

— Dr Eleri Anona Watson, Programme Co-Founder

The Global Majority and Underrepresented Writers’ Programme is made possible entirely through donations. We are actively seeking further support to ensure the Programme's long-term sustainability and to expand access in future years.

Your support can make a transformative difference: whether you’d like to sponsor a scholar’s place in our feedback group, underwrite a masterclass, fund mentorship sessions, or fund a flagship public lecture, your gift will directly empower underrepresented writers to develop their craft and share their stories.

To make a donation or learn more about how you can support the Programme, please contact
Dr Kate Kennedy.