Here’s the second of four posts telling you a little more about some of our contributors.

Dr James Canton has written widely in creative non-fiction forms and taught on the MA in Wild Writing at the University of Essex since its inception in 2009, exploring the ties between the literature and landscape of East Anglia. He has run many workshops to encourage writing on nature and landscape, and worked on Radio 4 detailing the writing and landscapes of Essex such as for ‘Something Understood’ on John Clare and Epping Forest (August 2014) and ‘Open Country’ on Tollesbury Wick and literary Essex (November 2015). His book Out of Essex: Re-Imagining a Literary Landscape (2013) is inspired by rural wanderings in the county. Ancient Wonderings: Journeys into Prehistoric Britain is forthcoming with Collins in 2017.

Tim Cunningham is an Irish poet who lives in Essex. His collections, Don Marcelino’s Daughter (2001) and Unequal Thirds (2006) were published by Peterloo Poets;  Kyrie (2008), Siege (2012) and Almost Memories (2014) by Revival Press.

Ivan Cutting helped found Eastern Angles in 1982 and is now its chief executive and artistic director. The company is a National Portfolio Organisation of the Arts Council and creates theatre with a sense of place. He has also written many of its plays, including in 2012 Private Resistance and in 2015 Oysters. For Radio 4 he wrote and directed The Reapers Year. He regularly contributes to the Birkbeck MFA Director’s course, is a Fellow of Suffolk New College, a Trustee of the East Anglian Traditional Music Trust, a director of New Heritage Solutions and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by UEA/University College Suffolk in 2004.

Mark Deal is a sound recordist, working between the field and the studio. An Essex-native, Mark aims in his sound work to provide a sense of what it was like to be in place (real or imagined) at a specific place and time. His website is at veryreverend.com.

Luke Elwes is a painter whose work has been exhibited widely in the UK and Europe since his first exhibition in 1990. He currently divides his time between the studio in London and the marshes, islands and creeks on the Essex coast.

Elaine Ewart is a poet and nature writer who recently completed an MA in Wild Writing: Literature and the Environment at the University of Essex. She was the first Fenland Poet Laureate in 2012, and her first short poetry collection, Fur, Feather and Fen, was self-published in 2014. She blogs at flightfeather.wordpress.com.

Dr Tim Gardiner is an ecologist and poet. His haiku have been published in literary magazines including Blithe Spirit, Frogpond and Presence. A collection of poetry, Wilderness, is published by Brambleby Books. He has published many papers on natural history and several books, including one about glow-worms.

Lander Hawes is a writer whose novel Captivity was published by Unthank Books in 2012. His story ‘Bird Tables for Swans’ was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2014, and ‘Differences in Lifts’ appeared in Unthology 2. He has read at events in London, Norwich and at the Short Wonder Short Story festival. He lives and works in Norwich.

Robert Jackson was born Cheltenham in 1944 and between 1962 to 1967 studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Between 1967 and 1969 he lived in a barn at Pattles Farm, Knodishall, Suffolk and moved into the former Primitive Methodist Chapel, Westleton in 1977. There, as Westleton Chapel Gallery, he mounted art exhibitions from 1979 to 1991, and in 1982, as Chapel Books, began selling rare and secondhand books. In 2009 he launched chapelbooks.com.

More to follow…