4th November, 2026

Merrie Snell

Merrie Snell is an American-born writer, artist, and academic who has made her home in the wilds of Northumberland. More accurately, she lives in Morpeth which, in truth, sits on the cusp of those magnificent wilds, in a gentle spot between coast and crags.

Merrie is a writer of daily life touched by the ineffable. Of coming to terms; rejecting expectations; of the fluid life of art and nature; of drawing together the mundane and extraordinary. And music! Especially music. Turn a page and you'll come face-to-face with Irving Berlin, The Beatles, or an Appalachian folk tune. On repeat.

Her fiction and poetry appear in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in the US and UK, including The Bridport Prize Anthology 2025, Anthropocene, New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, AGNI, Cimarron Review, among others. Her work has also been shortlisted for various awards and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from the prestigious University of Iowa Graduate Program in Creative Writing (a.k.a. The Iowa Writers' Workshop) and a PhD in music from Newcastle University. Her book, Lipsynching, on sound recording and the (dis)embodied voice was published by Bloomsbury Academic in their Study of Sound series.

Bennett Hogg

Bennett Hogg is a composer, sound artist, improviser and academic writer based in the Morpeth. Since 2003 he has taught composition, sound art, and musicology at Newcastle University.

Bennett works as a senior lecturer at Newcastle University. His many publications, exhibitions, musical compositions and performances can be found on his university staff profile.