MANI LIT FEST
Emma Cowell Emma is based in Greece with her husband, Tony who is also a writer. A former actress and BBC presenter, segueing from being paid to talk for a living into writing was a natural progression, since storytelling has been at the heart of her career to date. Outside of work, Emma is a keen angler and is attempting to improve her Greek language skills . . . she is yet to achieve a level of proficiency outside of tavernas and bakeries.
Carol McGrath Following a first degree in English and History, Carol McGrath completed an MA in Creative Writing from The Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University Belfast, followed by an MPhil in English from University of London. She is published by Headline. The Handfasted Wife, first in a trilogy about the royal women of 1066 was shortlisted for the RoNAS in 2014. The Swan-Daughter and The Betrothed Sister complete this highly acclaimed trilogy. Mistress Cromwell, a best-selling historical novel about Elizabeth Cromwell, wife of Henry VIII’s statesman, Thomas Cromwell, was republished by Headline in 2020. The Silken Rose, first in a Medieval She-Wolf Queens Trilogy, featuring Ailenor of Provence, saw publication in April 2020. This was followed by The Damask Rose. The Stone Rose was published April 2022. The Stolen Crown 2023 and July 2024 The Lost Queen about Berengaria of Navarre and The Third Crusade. She is currently writing a sequel to Mistress Cromwell. Carol writes Historical non-fiction as well as fiction. Sex and Sexuality in Tudor England was published in February 2022 by Pen & Sword. She frequently speaks at Conferences and gives podcast interviews.
Find Carol on her website: www.carolcmcgrath . Sign up for her regular newsletter using the relevant home page drop down.
Deborah Swift Deborah Swift is the author of twenty novels of historical fiction. Her Renaissance novel The Poison Keeper has been optioned for TV and was recently voted Best Book of the Decade by the Wishing Shelf Readers Award. Her WW2 novel Past Encounters was the winner of the BookViral Millennium Award, and is one of seven books set in that era. Her most recent novel is Last Train to Freedom, a wartime story set on the Trans-Siberian Express. Deborah has an MA in Creative Writing and enjoys mentoring other writers and teaching writing classes for her local adult education college. She lives in the North of England close to the mountains and the sea.
Brenda Grate is a certified Practical Herbalist, holistic health coach, and author who lives in a stone house on the Mani peninsula with her husband Chad. Her first herbal book, The Mediterranean Herbalist: Stories and Herbal Remedies from Italy and Greece, will be released in fall 2026 by Book Shelter. The book blends memoir, plant medicine, and the herbal traditions of the Mediterranean, drawn from years of living and practicing in Greece and Italy. Brenda is also the author of four novels, including The Invisible Girl. Alongside her writing, she works one-on-one with clients, guiding them through plant-based protocols rooted in constitutional assessment and ancestral wisdom. She has ghostwritten more than fifteen nonfiction books through her business Grate Writes. Find her at mugwortandmeadow.com, where she publishes the monthly Herbal Letters.
Alizon Robertson is a retired Creative Writing tutor who writes in the genre of crime fiction and the ghost story. She has finally (after too many rewrites and edits to mention) finished her speculative thriller The Lantern Bearers and is about to embark on her next novel - Lost Boys: a story of a haunting.
Jon Thompson Jon Thompson is a poet, professor emeritus, editor and essayist. He has published five full-length collections of poems, the latest of which is The Distances (2024). He has also published a collection of lyrical essays on American culture, After Paradise. His most recent project, Camera Obscura, is hybrid memoir of photographs, prose and prose poems. His editing projects include founding the online journal, Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, and the poetry series, Free Verse Editions and Illuminations, a series on American poetics. He now divides his time between the U.S. and Greece.
Peter Hughes is a poet and visual artist based in Umbria, Italy. His poems include distinctive versions of classic Italian texts, including work by Petrarch, Cavalcanti and Leopardi. He has been the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University. His poetry publications include a Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2013). Other books include Quite Frankly – after Petrarch’s Sonnets (Reality Street, 2015), Cavalcanty (Carcanet, 2017), via Leopardi 21 (Equipage, 2017), A Berlin Entrainment (Shearsman, 2019), Arrangements (Aquifer, 2022, with Eléna Rivera), The Modulus of Rupture (Shearsman, 2023), Lent (Equipage 2024) and Drawn (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).
Theresa Stoker (Festival Organiser) has won competitions in various genres including theatre, short story and travel writing. Her travel pieces have appeared in the Telegraph Just Back travel section and been published in indie magazines. She is very proud of being part of Write Club The Podcast for 2 years and 100 episodes. In 2020 she was interviewed by French filmmaker Sonia Dauger for a documentary about author Marguerite Yourcenar for the ARTE TV channel.
Melanie Wicks (Festival Organiser) has lived in the Mani for over 20 years and during that time has played the violin in various local bands, started a local theatre group along with Theresa Stoker, and co-created the Mani Lit Fest with Theresa Stoker and Carol McGrath in 2018. She also designed and maintains this website for Mani LIt Fest.
Melanie is an aspiring writer and has so far produced a few short stories and is in the early stages of writing a novel set in Greece. Read her ghost story 'Miroloi' (set in the Mani) in our Lit Fest Library
Pat Woolfe (host of Open Mic) is a retired English and drama teacher from Manchester, who now spends most of the year in Stoupa, where she lives with her husband Mike, and numerous cats.
She is one of the founder members of Write Club the Podcast, where she says she finally had the chance to develop some of the stories inspired by characters, situations, snippets of conversation she had been mentally filing away for future reference. Her previous literary efforts were often in response to the need to provide drama material for students, or members of the Youth Theatre she ran, and included several short plays. More recently, she has produced a number of short stories, often with just a hint of darkness, one of which won the 1st prize in the 2019 Mani Lit Fest Short Story competition.