Our Authors

Ziauddin Sardar

Ziauddin Sardar is an award-winning writer, futurist and cultural critic. He is the author of over fifty books, including Reading the Qur’an, Mecca: The Sacred City, and his best-selling autobiographies, Desperately Seeking Paradise and Balti Britain. Sardar has worked as a science journalist for Nature and New Scientist, as a reporter from London Weekend Television and Channel 4 and radio programmes for the BBC. He is also a former columnist on the New Statesman and is an internationally renowned public intellectual.

Merryl Wyn Davies

The late Merryl Wyn Davies was a writer, BBC producer and anthropologist. She is the author of many books, including the classic study, Knowing One Another: Shaping an Islamic AnthropologyI, and co-author of the international bestseller, Why Do People Hate America. Davies co-authored books and articles with Ziauddin Sardar and was director of the Muslim Institute, London.

Richard Appignanesi

Richard Appignanesi was born in Montreal, Canada, and received a doctorate in art history from the University of Sussex in 1973. He co-founded the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative the following year, alongside others including John Berger, Chris Searle, and Lisa Appignanesi. He was the originating editor of the ubiquitous For Beginners/Introducing… series, and authored many of their most popular titles. He has written four novels and several monographs, and has re-written Shakespeare’s works into an accessible format through the popular Manga Shakespeare series.

Mevlut Ceylan

Mevlut Ceylan was born in Ankara and since 1979 has been living in self-imposed exile in London. He has published three collections of his own poetry in Turkish and has translated many Turkish poets into English. He founded Core: An International Poetry Magazine with the poet Feyyaz Fergar in London. He has translated into Turkish selections from James Joyce’s Chamber Music, RD Laing’s Conversations with Children, and poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Marvin X, Amiri Baraka, Kobi Nazrul Islam, among many others, in Turkish literary journals.

John Butt

John Butt was born in Trinidad and, after attending boarding school in England, travelled the “hippie trail” to Southeast Asia in 1970. He became a scholar of Islam and broadcaster across the region, and worked with the BBC World Service to produce a Pashto-language radio soap opera based upon The Archers in Afghanistan.

Iain Maitland

Iain Maitland is the author of two mental health memoirs, Dear Michael, Love Dad (Hodder) and Out of the Madhouse (JKP) and the best-selling psych thriller, The Perfect Husband (Inkubator Books). He is an Ambassador for the teenage mental health charity, Stem4, and speaks regularly at literary and mental health events.

Muzahid Kahn

Muzahid has been at the heart of local and global initiatives that have made real differences to peoples’ lives. He serves as a volunteer governance advisor for multiple organisations, including the Amana Foundation and he holds a position as a board member of Maggie’s Cancer Centre. Muzahid is a certified NLP coach, and his efforts have been recognised by Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for being a young achiever in 1998, and his work was also commended by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2000. During 2013, he became one of almost 50,000 changemakers certified by the US Climate Reality Leadership Corps. He was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for the county of Greater Manchester in June 2021.

Paul Sutherland

Paul Sutherland is a Canadian-British poet and the founder of Dream Catcher, an international literary journal. His own writing has appeared in countless anthologies, newspapers and periodicals. Sutherland has an MA in English Literature from the University of York and became a Sufi Muslim and freelance writer in 2004. He lives with his wife in Lincolnshire.  

Samantha Terrell

Samantha Terrell is an internationally-published American poet whose anthology Dismantling Mountains plays with free verse, experimental, and rhymed and un-rhymed poetry. Terrell’s poetry, which emphasises self-awareness as a means to social awareness, has been shortlisted for the Anita McAndrews Poets for Human Rights Award organised by Poets Without Borders.