The Essay Creators & Guests

Cristal Duhaime is a Producer of the Love Me podcast.

Mary Costello is a writer.Mary Costello was born in Galway.Before becoming a full-time author, Costello was a teacher.Costello's work has been serialised on BBC Radio 4. Her first book, the collection "The China Factory," was published in 2012. Her second book, the novel, "Academy Street," was published in 2014, and her second novel "The River Capture" was published in 2019.

Sinéad Morrissey is a poet.Morrissey has published six collections of poetry. Her first was "There Was Fire in Vancouver," which was published in 1996. Her fifth collection, "Parallax," won the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize, and her sixth collection, "On Balance," won the 2017 Forward Prize for Poetry.Morrissey received her B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Trinity College Dublin.

Penelope Anne Sparke is a writer and academic who specializes in the history of design. She is a Professor of Design History at Kingston University, London, where she is also Director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre.Sparke received her B.A. in French Literature and her P.G.C.E. in Education from Sussex University, and her Ph.D. in Design History from Brighton Polytechnic.

Fintan O'Toole is a columnist, literary editor, writer, journalist, drama critic for The Irish Times, and author of the book, The Politics of Pain.

Alice Oswald is a poet and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.Oswald's first book, "The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile," was published in 1996. Her work has won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence.

Dame Penelope Margaret Lively is a fiction author for both children and adults.Lively's first book, the children's book "Astercote," was published in 1970. Lively has won both the Booker Prize, for "Moon Tiger," and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books, for "The Ghost of Thomas Kempe."

Michael Rosen is an author and poet who has written 140 books.

Andrew McGregor is a musician and a music reviewer. Currently, he is the host of the weekly BBC Radio 3 show “Record Review.”McGregor sang alto in Guildford Cathedral Choir and was a violinist for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. He has played string backing for rock groups.McGregor read music at Surrey University.

Wendy Erskine is an author. She is also head of English and a drama teacher at a grammar school in east Belfast.Erskine's work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Female Lines: New Writing from Northern Ireland and Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, and on BBC Radio 4. Her first book, the collection "Sweet Home," was published in 2018. It won the 2020 Butler Literary Award, and was Book of the Year in the Guardian, The White Review, Observer, New Statesman, and TLS.