Writers and Readers Salon: Non-Fiction Edition 

About Speakers

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  Aimee Cliff

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  Aimee Cliff

  Aimee Cliff (she/they) is a BACP-registered integrative psychotherapist and author. Their debut non-fiction book How to Read Minds (William Collins, UK)/Empathy Takes Action (The Experiment, US) is about empathy and neurodivergence, and was developed initially as part of the Wellcome Collection Non-Fiction Awards in 2022. Aimee began her career as a music and culture journalist, writing for Dazed, The Guardian, The FADER, and many others.

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  Carla Montemayor

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  Carla Montemayor

  Carla Montemayor is a writer originally from the Philippines, now living in London. She won a London Writers Award for narrative nonfiction in 2021 and was a fellow on the London Library Emerging Writers Programme 2022-23. Her writing has been shortlisted for Spread the Word’s Life Writing Award (2020), and the Specimen Press competition To Speak England in Different Languages (2021). She has contributed work to acclaimed food writing anthology London Feeds Itself (2022), and her essay ‘The Shapeshifters’ in Hinterland Magazine was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021.

  Her debut book, Islands of Forgotten Daughters, was inspired by her discovery of an ancestor who was secluded and trained as a storyteller and culture bearer in central Philippines. Called a binukot, her great-great grandmother was kept secluded since childhood, trained to memorise and sing the myths of her community. The book is partly about the role of women and of memory in keeping indigenous cultures alive after waves of colonisation and migration.

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  Masud Husain

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  Masud Husain

  Masud Husain is Professor of Neurology & Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford. His book Our Brains, Our Selves won the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book of the Year in 2025.

  Unusually, Masud works across departments of neuroscience, brain imaging and psychology to understand cognitive functions in both healthy people and patients with brain disorders. He studied Medicine at Oxford and was a Harkness Fellow at MIT, before holding positions at Imperial College and becoming Professor of Neurology at UCL (University College London) and the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, London. Masud is a practising clinician with over 25 years of experience of seeing people with a range of neurological conditions. He also leads a research group which has made key contributions to understanding cognitive function in healthy individuals and people with disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, Parkinson’s disease and stroke. He co-leads the Dementia theme of the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre and is Editor-in-Chief of Brain, an international journal of neurology.

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  Rageshri Dhairyawan

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  Rageshri Dhairyawan

  Rageshri Dhairyawan is a doctor, researcher and author. She is an NHS Consultant in Sexual Health and HIV Medicine based in London. Her clinical work, research, writing and advocacy focus on improving health equity and she is a sought-after speaker on this topic. Rageshri’s own experiences of being unheard as a patient and her work with minoritised communities, have inspired her to speak up about injustice in healthcare.

  Rageshri is the author of Unheard: The Medical Practice of Silencing and has contributed an essay to the anthology No One Talks About This Stuff. She is an inaugural Wellcome Collection x Spread the Word writer awardee. Rageshri has written for The Lancet, BMJ Leader and Media Diversified and has appeared on The Victoria Derbyshire Show, Channel 5 News, BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC World Service and BBC Sounds, among others.