The Board.

John Davies, Founder and Director

John founded THE SOUTH in 2002, produced its first project Place of Birth and was its Director until March 2008. He is now Project Director of R:Fest, the Forest Ridge Project and Brighton Children’s Book Festival Co-Ed programme.

John's first collection The Nutter in the Shrubbery was published in 2002 and in the same year he won an
Archi-texts Award for his first residency as the original Shedman. He has also received an Arts Council England personal development award. His poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies and he has read his work at events and festivals in the UK, Ireland and Europe. His full collection Shedman was published in January 2008.

A highly experienced workshop leader, John has run creative writing workshops in shops, schools, galleries, museums, churches, libraries, hospitals and prisons, for all ages and abilities.

John is also an award-winning scriptwriter, director and producer. He recently produced the DVD about the new Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital in Brighton working with the Children’s and Young People’s Board and STOMP!

Hugh Dunkerley, Chair

Hugh has been the West Sussex Poet Laureate since 2001, a role which involves promoting literature in the county, and teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester.

Hugh has published two pamphlet collections, Walking to the Fire Tower (Redbeck Press) and Fast (Pighog Press). Individual poems have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies both in the UK and North America, including Stand, The Fiddlehead (Canada) and Irish Pages. A selection of his work will be appearing in Oxford Poets 2007(Carcanet).

Hugh has been a Gregory Award winner as well as a Hawthornden Fellow, a Leighton Studio Fellow at the Banff Centre for Arts in Alberta, Canada and current projects include the ongoing running of ‘Tongues and Strings’, a community arts organisation which has produced two anthologies of work by writers in the South East, an organisation that Hugh founded and a film poem collaboration about Kingley Vale, the largest yew wood in Europe.

Maria Jastrzebska, Director

Maria Jastrzebska was born in Warsaw, Poland and grew up in London. She founded SOUTH POLE a network of Polish artists and co-runs Queer Writing South, encouraging the work of emerging, local writers and editing an anthology of their work with John McCullough to be launched at Brighton and Hove PRIDE 2008.

She is author of POSTCARDS FROM POLAND (Working Press) ‘HOME FROM HOME’ (Flarestack ) and SYRENA (Redbeck Press 2004) and was a co-editor of Forum Polek a bilingual anthology of women’s writing and of Poetry South Anthology (2007).

Her poems and translations appear in numerous anthologies and journals, most recently in ‘Images of Women’ (Arrowhead), Apokalipsa (Slovenia), Brand, Chroma, Dans La Lune, (France), The Interpreter’s House, Frogmore Papers, Kirjailija (Finland), Smiths Knoll, Staple and will shortly appear in Atlas and pRO Project (Romania). Her prose poem sequence Dementia Diaries and other poems featured on Poetry International Web 2007 in ‘From Elsewhere’ by Moniza Alvi.

In 2006 she was invited to the Golden Boat International Translation Workshop in Slovenia and since then has gained a reputation both as a poet and translator internationally. Currently she is co-translating ‘Green Skyscrapers’ a new collection by Slovenian poet Iztok Osojnik with Ana Jelnikar.

Paul Madden, Director

Paul is an award-wining film-maker and currently one of the Trustees of the influential poetry magazine Agenda and Chair of the Brighton Children’s Book Festival.

A founder committee member of the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Paul has served on the councils of both IPPA and PACT (the bodies representing independent producers), and on the board of the Southern Screen Commission, and was a member of the Board of South East Arts, the regional arts agency.

Appointed one of Channel 4’s original Commissioning Editors in 1980 and as part of this pioneering team, he helped create the Channel’s reputation for innovation and was subsequently responsible for a wide variety of productions including animation, documentaries, and media, for adult and children’s audiences alike.

In the animation field Madden won for Channel 4 an enviable international reputation, responsible for commissioning many award-winning films by leading animators from Britain and abroad, such as Oscar-winner Creature Comforts (Nick Park), the enduring Christmas classic The Snowman (Dianne Jackson – BAFTA winner, Prix Jeunesse winner, Oscar nominated), When the Wind Blows (Jimmy Murakami – feature film), and Alice (Jan Svankmayer – feature film).

Linda Dyos, Director

Linda Dyos is a highly experienced arts development consultant with specialist expertise in cultural policy, funding and practice.

Her many years in London as a senior arts funder and policy development manager expanded into consultancy at the London Docklands Development Corporation and adviser to a variety of building-based arts organisations and touring companies. More recently, she has developed/contributed to new policies and product for the tourism and creative industry sectors as well as creating and managing a successful film commission in South London. She sits on various Boards and committees but is particularly keen to contribute to THE SOUTH’s exciting plans for the future.

Linda has an MA in European Cultural Policy and Planning and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Isabel Ashdown Croucher, director

Isabel is a writer and interim business manager with a background in the retail industry, previously holding the position of Director of Product for the European arm of The Body Shop.

Four years ago, Isabel took a career break to follow a long-held dream to embark on a Creative Writing degree, which she completed in 2007 with first class honours.

Alongside family life, she now divides her time between corporate work and her MA in Creative Writing, for which she is working on her first novel.