UV Committee

Committee Chair

Richard is the head teacher of an international school in London and the author of Mutiny in Pea Soup, a 2024 Undiscovered Voices winner. He has written several fantasy novels for Middle Grade and young adults, full of quirky characters in unusual settings. He lives with his wife and their two children in West Byfleet, Surrey.

Deputy Chair

Maggie was an Undiscovered Voices finalist in 2024, and the winner of the Cheshire Novel Prize for kids in the same year. She writes YA thrillers with a psychological twist, and Middle Grade adventures for younger readers. Before starting to write, Maggie was an archive film producer for the TV industry. She currently lives in Bucks with her husband and fifteen-year-old son.

@MaggieRobb2

Submissions Manager

Victoria is a UV2022 winner and her two-book YA solarpunk series, Solartopia, was recently published by Fischer Sauerlände. The series was commissioned by UV sponsors Working Partners. Her passion is science fiction, in particular anything involving weird and wonderful plants. She works as a botanist for her day job, surveying habitats in England and lives in Brighton.

Web guy

Adam gained his PhD building part of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, before quitting academia and going to teach physics in a rural town in central Sudan. He’s always been passionate about science, and now, as a researcher and novelist, he gets to weave story-telling into his research, and science into his story-telling in equal measure.

Adam was an Undiscovered Voices 2022 winner and the author of two sciency thrillers. The Girl Who Broke The Sea, set in the near future on board the world’s first deep-sea mining rig, was nominated for the Yoto Carnegie medal for writing and shortlisted for the Cheshire, Redbridge, and Oxford libraries book awards. His latest novel, Find Me After, was published by Scholastic UK in July 2024.

He lives in Hertfordshire with his family, a dog, and some sickly fish.

web: http://aconnors.com | instagram: a_connors_writes | twitter: @aconnors_writes

Diversity Director

Eiman was an Undiscovered Voices finalist in 2024. She loves writing Middle Grade books with autistic protagonists and exploring her own heritage through them. As an autism advocate and late diagnosed autistic adult, she co-facilitates training with the National Autistic Society for organisations like Warner Brothers, Harry Potter Studios, Ofsted Inspectors, NHS professionals and many more. She also creates projects that support her local community in Brent exploring heritage, culture and the arts, with an eye to making them inclusive for children with special needs.  Eiman was awarded The Margaret Carey Scholarship in 2023, and Arts Council Awards in 2019 and 2023.

Online Events Coordinator

Jo Howard is a 2024 Undiscovered Voices finalist with her YA novel Legal Walls, which also won the 2023 Skylark Soaring Stories Competition. Her work has been shortlisted for the Mslexia 2022 Children’s and YA Novel Prize, and longlisted for the 2022 Guppy Open Submission Award. She lives in Manchester with her husband and three children.

Judges and Mentor Liason

Sarah is a YA writer from Ireland with a background in film and TV. In 2018 she moved to London to pursue a career in publishing, and now works in a Media Rights role for a major publisher. In 2024 she was an Undiscovered Voices finalist, as well as making the shortlist for the Guppy Open Submission Competition. In the same year she also long-listed in the Bath Novel Award, and the Times/Chicken House Competition. She enjoys film, yoga and the music of Taylor Swift, and is looking forward to supporting the writers of UV 26.

Anthology Production

Catriona was an Undiscovered Voices 2024 finalist with her atmospheric YA novel, The Book of Marionetta Stone. She works in publishing and her recent projects include Northern Dreaming – a children’s anthology co-published by LEEDS 2023 and The British Library, which was gifted to every child born in Leeds in 2023. In 2023 she won a Develop Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England, along with mentoring from Cornerstones Literary Agency. 

Natalie was an Undiscovered Voices finalist in 2024. She writes funny stories, from picture books to middle grade, often inspired by her home in rural Cumbria. She is currently working on a chapter book series about a group of environmental activist woodland animals (it is funny, honest). By day, she works in charity communications, having previously been a regional newspaper journalist and an English teacher in Japan.

Lizzie has been variously a Bookseller, TEFL Teacher, Publishing Assistant, and Neuropsychology Researcher. She lives in Scotland with her wife, wrangles data for a living, and writes fiction for adults and young adults whenever she can find the time. She has been published in some journals, listed in a few competitions, and was a finalist in the 2024 Undiscovered Voices Anthology with her ‘optimistic dystopian’ novel As Dreams are Made.

Janeen grew up in Florida, a place she loves and hates in equal measure, and now lives in London with her partner and children. She’s half-Pakistani, half-New Yorker, a lapsed lawyer, teacher, Muslim and Catholic. She is the winner of the 2023 Guppy Open Submission competition. When not writing, Janeen is Director of Collective Action at the Fair Education Alliance, advocating for educational opportunities for every child — including, of course, access to great books and the skills to read them!