Writer's Mosaic: Stay In Your Lane

WritersMosaic is an online magazine and developmental resource focused on UK writers of the global majority. One of WritersMosaic’s animating principles is to create more opportunities for writers of the global majority to expand beyond the writing expected of them. Crudely speaking, these authors are often told to stay in their lane, to focus on matters of race, and to only write about people of the same phenotype. To a certain extent, the inverse is also true, with white writers nervous about writing about ‘black subjects’, and discouraged from doing so.

If everyone is being schooled to stick to ‘what they know’, so as to avoid accusations of taking up space, or of cultural appropriation, what might we be missing?

On the fifth anniversary of WritersMosaic Magazine, the editor Colin Grant is joined by writers Will Harris, Maggie Gee, Hannah Lowe and Amy Abdelnoor to reflect on the limits of empathy, and the risks and rewards of straying from your lane.

Event Schedule

6:30pm: Pre-event socialising and networking
A cash bar will be available for refreshments.

7:00pm: Event begins

8:00pm: Event ends

Speakers

Amy Abdelnoor is a British Arab writer and English teacher. She studied English and Arabic at the University of Cambridge. She lived and worked in the West Bank and in refugee camps in Lebanon in her early twenties. These experiences inspired Ever Land, her debut novel, an early iteration of which was shortlisted for the 2023 Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She is married with three children.

Hannah Lowe is a poet and memoirist, concerned with migration histories, multicultural London and the complex legacies of the British Empire. Her forthcoming book is The Woman in the Chinese Collar (Feb 2026, Scribner). She is the founder of the writers’ mentoring programme, Writing Otherwise, and Poetry Editor for WritersMosaic Magazine.

Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books Rendang (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan University Press in the US, and the essay Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula) which came out in 2018.He has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and been shortlisted for the T.S. EliotPrize. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule.

Maggie Gee is the author of seventeen critically acclaimed books, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages. These include the novels The Red Children, My Cleaner and The White Family (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and a memoir, My Animal Life. Gee is a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 for her services to literature.