Film: Harry Wootliff

Leeds-born writer and director Harry Wootliff’s journey into film-making came via a stint as a performer: she trained as a dancer and actor before turning her attention to writing. Things clicked into place when she made her first short, Nits, a multi-award winning heart-tug of a film that earned a prestigious slot in Cannes.

“I remember standing on set, looking at the actress and thinking, this is perfect,” she says. “I get to act through someone else. I don’t have to be the focus. It was a revelation really.” It’s perhaps because of her experience as an actor that Wootliff brings such an acute emotional intelligence to her work with her stars.

We meet in London’s Soho, around the corner from the post-production studio where Wootliff is editing two episodes of the ITV series Deep Water. Warm and funny, with a ready laugh, she says the idea behind her feature debut, Only You (due out in the summer), was to tell “a contemporary relationship story, where you really see what goes on behind closed doors. I wanted the problem between them to be that they couldn’t conceive a child. At the time, I was trying to get pregnant. At the beginning of development, I didn’t have a baby; by the time we shot, I had a two-year-old. So partly I was tapping into how I felt.”

Toby MacDonald

The director’s charming debut feature, Old Boys, starring Alex Lawther, is released in February.

Marcus Rutherford

The actor made a strong film debut with London riots drama Obey; his next feature, County Lines, is in production.

Ella Smith

Stars in artist Richard Billingham’s directorial debut, Ray & Liz, based on his memories of growing up in a Black Country council flat.

It’s an intimate, stingingly honest film driven by two extraordinary performances. Laia Costa, fresh from carrying the German single-shot thriller Victoria, plays Elena, a Spanish woman in her mid-30s, living and working in Glasgow. She meets postgrad student Jake (Josh O’Connor, who dazzled in God’s Own Country) by chance, when they argue over a taxi on New Year’s Eve. The connection is instant. And despite a 10-year age gap, they start a relationship that feels just right. But their happy-ever-after story involves a wish for children.

For Wootliff, representation is a key issue – it’s not good enough just to see more women’s stories in cinema. “Obviously there’s a new wave of feminism. But I sometimes think it’s all about showing women to be very strong. I like my character because she’s a lot of things: she’s vulnerable, irrational, funny. That’s a woman. We have qualities that are deemed as less admirable – perhaps because we are in a male-dominated society – so why shouldn’t we see them?” Wendy Ide

Science: Anna Perdrix Rosell

Anna Perdrix Rosell admits that she was always destined to become a scientist, ever since she first learned to operate a microscope at the age of five. As a child growing up in northern Spain, Perdrix Rosell would spend many hours poring over everything from blood spots to bits of vegetables, fascinated by the intricate patterns of the tiny cells.

“My dad and I would collect samples together,” she remembers. “He had his own company, developing forms of pest control for agriculture, but he was a frustrated biologist at heart.”

Two decades on, Perdrix Rosell is one of Europe’s leading young scientists, having launched her own startup, Sixfold Bioscience – which aims to improve the way we deliver treatments to cancer patients – as well as undertaking a PhD at the Francis Crick Institute in London, all by the age of 26.

Vivian Li

Also at the Crick, Li researches stem cells and cancer using ‘mini-guts’ to inspect the disease in a dish.

Lucia Prieto-Godino

Studies the brain’s neural circuits; has also trained more than 200 scientists from 23 African countries.

Henry Snaith

Oxford University professor researching cheap solar energy.

But her journey to the frontiers of cancer medicine was initially fuelled by family tragedy. She recalls the time that her uncle and aunt were both diagnosed with cancer, when she was 15. “She’s still with us, but he died soon after he was diagnosed,” she says. “Since then, I’ve been determined to pursue cancer research.”

With Sixfold, she is hoping to change the way we treat different cancer types. Instead of defining tumours by their location in the body, Perdrix Rosell believes we should characterise them based on the receptors on the surface of the cell membrane, and use this to deliver drugs exclusively to cancer cells, without affecting healthy cells. Along with Sixfold’s co-founders George Foot and Zuzanna Brzosko, she has started to test her theories on lab mice. Sixfold’s tiny nanoparticles are used to deliver high doses of medication directly to various tumours – ranging from colorectal cancer to forms of brain and lung cancer – all of which have a common surface receptor.

If this succeeds during 2019, she hopes to fast-track her treatments into human trials. Her ideas have already captured the imagination of several Silicon Valley and UK investors, and Perdrix Rosell aims to raise more financial backing during the next funding round. In the meantime, there is the small matter of finishing her PhD, and perhaps squeezing in a rare moment to chill out. “I basically have two full-time jobs at the moment, and I simply have no time,” she laughs. “When I do have free time, I sleep!” David Cox

Food: Rachel Ama

Four years ago, when Rachel Ama gave up meat, fish, eggs and dairy more or less overnight after watching online documentaries exposing cruelty in animal agriculture, she received a lot of raised eyebrows from her friends and family. “No one around me was vegan,” she recalls, “and everyone was constantly asking me, ‘Rachel, what are you eating? I don’t understand.’ I was like, ‘Guys, my food is good, I promise – it’s not just kale and celery.’”

The bemusement of her peers provided valuable fuel for what happened next. “I wanted to get people in my social circles to see that what I was making was really tasty,” Ama tells me when we meet at her family home in north London. “So I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to go on YouTube and share it.’” She posted her first video in September 2017. Now Ama has 140,000 subscribers, a fact that didn’t escape the publishers Ebury, who offered the 27-year-old a book deal last August.

Alissa Timoshkina

Film scholar turned cook (and founder of KinoVino) explores her Siberian heritage in Salt & Time, out in March.

Selina Periampillai

Building on the success of her Mauritian-themed supper club with cookbook The Island Kitchen (May).

Santiago Lastra

The Mexican-born chef (ex-Noma) is due to open his first restaurant, Kol, in central London this year.

Ama’s appeal is obvious. She is a natural on air, full of personality, spontaneity and a willingness to be, as she puts it, “a bit weird” (she does a lot of singing and dancing to camera). It also helps that her food is delicious. Sitting in the white-tiled kitchen where she films all her videos, we tuck into a west African peanut curry – one of her mum’s favourites – with sweet potato instead of chicken and lashings of peanut butter for richness. Her take on Caribbean fritters, using jackfruit in place of salt fish, tastes uncannily like the original – she adds a bit of nori to give it a maritime kick. The meal is rounded off with a boozy rum cake that dispenses with the eggs but, gratifyingly, doesn’t skimp on the rum.

Ama’s book, to be published in June, will feature veganised dishes from her London upbringing, such as lasagne and kebabs, but it’s the Afro-Caribbean influences that give her food real colour and kick, setting her apart from the ever-growing crowd of vegan influencers, authors and broadcasters.

“My dad’s side is Caribbean, my mum is half-African, half-Welsh,” she says, “so there were always diverse cultures and food conversations at home. I grew up around different spices and exciting flavours. That’s what I’m used to. Now I’m just doing it with vegetables and making it really tasty.” Killian Fox

Art: Sean Edwards

In a suburban garden in Cardiff, past discarded toys and a blue plastic slide, is the studio of the artist representing Wales at the 2019 Venice Biennale. A DIY wooden structure full of random objects and scrawled notes (“not expecting much”; “dissapointing [sic] rather than specatcular [sic]”), it suits Sean Edwards’s aesthetic.

A 38-year-old sculptor with a stunning CV (an MA from the Slade School of Fine Art, solo exhibitions behind him in London, Berlin and Bristol), Edwards is also a “very dyslexic” father of two, brought up by a single mother on a Cardiff council estate in the 1980s.

His work explores the sculptural possibilities of objects in ordinary people’s lives, often by using multimedia. His breakthrough 2010 solo show, Maelfa, was about the brutalist shopping centre he lived near as a child, incorporating a silent film, photographs, prints, models and ephemera. Another project, on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, saw Edwards presenting his notebooks instead of anything grander, because this felt “more honest”.

“I like closing in on small details,” he says. “They often have the potential to tell us about bigger things on a wider scale.” Sculpture shouldn’t just be about “chipping away at huge things with a hammer, anyway”, he adds. “It should be about people experiencing objects in a space, and being drawn into them.”

Larry Achiampong

Shortlisted for the 2018 Jarman award, the film-maker will make work for the 2019 Art on the Underground series.

Helen Cammock

The Max Mara prize winner will exhibit at Whitechapel Gallery in 2019.

Tai Shani

Terrifically eccentric young artist. Look out for her book Our Fatal Magic, based on her Dark Continent project, later this year.

Edwards’s Biennale project broaches new territory, however: it includes a theatre piece, which involves him working with National Theatre Wales. He won’t reveal more about his “poetic inquiry into place, politics and class, intertwined with personal histories” that will open in Venice in May, but his ongoing interest in the topic of disappointment has a place, and a memory of being put into a different line for free school meals mirrors some sketches on the studio wall. “I am a working artist because of university grants, Arts Council funding and money from the Welsh government,” he smiles.

Edwards also loves being an artist in Cardiff, having worked with the g39 artist-run space in the city; he also teaches at the Cardiff School of Art and Design, where he was an undergraduate. “It’s really exciting here. I see this in Birmingham and Liverpool as well – there are more opportunities in smaller cities, and the costs aren’t astronomical. People forget that smaller places can be the most interesting, really.” It’s certainly a philosophy he lives by. Jude Rogers

Theatre: Lynette Linton

It looks like 2019 will be busy for Lynette Linton. Having just opened Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer prize-winning Sweat at the Donmar Warehouse in London to five-star reviews, the director and writer is set to take over from Madani Younis as artistic director of west London’s Bush theatre. She’s also curating Passages at the Royal Court in April, a day celebrating the Windrush generation; it’s a subject close to her heart, as her father came to Britain from Guyana when he was 12. Not bad for a 28-year-old who only got into theatre about seven years ago.

“I’m working class, I wasn’t raised in theatre,” Linton says. “I grew up in a council house in Leytonstone. My dad would always say ‘stay in your job at John Lewis, you’ve got to have money coming in’. I remember going, is theatre the right thing for me? Is there anyone else like me that’s done this? There were, and there are – look at what’s happening in the industry now.”

Suba Das

Leicester Curve’s associate director becomes HighTide’s new artistic director.

Rebecca Frecknall

The director returns to the Almeida with Three Sisters after her Summer and Smoke moved to the West End.

Gabriel Gbadamosi

The Irish-Nigerian poet and playwright  debuts on the London stage with Stop and Search at the Arcola this month.

Linton is part of a wave of newly appointed artistic directors reflecting the industry’s attempts to diversify, from Kwame Kwei-Armah at the Young Vic to Nadia Fall at Theatre Royal Stratford East – Linton’s local, which staged her plays Step and Chicken Palace. Her mission is to widen theatre’s appeal in terms of age, race and class. Linton laughs at how everyone says she’s “so young” to run a building; this should be an asset when tackling why young audiences don’t go to the theatre. “Everybody goes to the cinema – and cinema’s really expensive!” she points out, adding that she does get why young, diverse audiences may feel unwelcome: the people sitting in the stalls are often overwhelmingly white and old. Sometimes, she says, she feels out of place even watching her own shows.

With Sweat, particularly, it’s important to her that “it’s not just seen by the same people that watch every Donmar show”. The play tells the story of a group of friends pitted against one another when their jobs at a factory in Reading, Pennsylvania are threatened. Brexit parallels will, Linton says, be obvious. “My whole thing is unheard voices – that’s why I got into theatre, because people like me aren’t represented. When I heard about Lynn Nottage, that’s what she does,” she says. “Theatre is a medium for everybody: we need to make sure all those stories are heard.” Holly Williams

Jazz: Steam Down Orchestra

If 2018 was the year that the world’s ears tuned to the UK jazz underground, a must-attend midweek jam session in Deptford, south London, is where its spirit was celebrated. At Steam Down, spiritual jazz and west African rhythms are twisted up with future soul, grime and Afrofuturist spoken word about utopias without Oyster cards. Entry is by donation so that anyone can afford to go. The musicians in the Steam Down Orchestra play on the floor at eye level, dissolving the barrier between band and fan, with whatever big-name guest rolls through that week. The superstar saxophonist Kamasi Washington loves it so much he’s turned up and joined in twice.

The first rule of Steam Down is “don’t be afraid to move your body”, says saxophonist Wayne Francis, the collective’s de facto spokesperson who goes by the stage name Ahnansé. Key to the night is the energy between performers and the crowd. “It’s about taking part,” says Francis. “It’s not really about being a spectator.”

Nérija

Largely female supergroup who will release their debut on Domino this year.

Seed Ensemble

Emerging band whose debut album, Driftglass, is due in February.

Sarah Tandy

Promising young pianist who launches her debut album, Infection in the Sentence, at Ronnie Scott’s in March.

Since Steam Down took their live show to the Jazz Cafe in October, their flagship night in Deptford has been a roadblock every week and become a focal point for the UK jazz scene. The band totals 12 players, including Sons of Kemet members Eddie Hick and Theon Cross (four were away when we took our photograph). But despite these jazz credentials, Steam Down find the term too limiting. “I don’t feel UK jazz is a broad enough category for us,” says Francis. “We were playing some trap last night!” Musical fluidity is “integral” to Steam Down, as is improvisation. “No song is fixed.”

Until now, Steam Down haven’t had to release anything to get bookings. “Instagram is our album,” says Francis. “You go to #steamdown, check out the clips and catch the feeling.” Or you can text their “hotline” for details of shows and special guests, which has helped cultivate a dedicated community of more than 800 people (that’s the total number in their phonebook). But they are finally going to record their music in January and it makes sense that it’ll be during a three-hour live performance. A Mercury nomination “would be nice”, but it’s not a measure for Steam Down’s success. “If someone said, ‘Steam Down helped me go through grieving after I lost my dad’,” says Francis, “it’s at the top of the list of achievements.” Kate Hutchinson

Steam Down’s weekly nights at Buster Mantis, Deptford, south London, will return in February

TV: Niamh Algar

Landing a lead role in the writer-director Shane Meadows’s new TV series was a dream come true for Niamh Algar. “I’m a major fan of Shane’s work,” says the Irish actor from Mullingar. “I’m the youngest of five and when I was 15, one of the first DVDs I robbed off my older brothers was This Is England. I’d never seen anything like it. It was a different beast to Dawson’s Creek or the romcoms I’d been watching. Shane’s a genius, so to be auditioning for him, let alone get the part, was mindblowing.”

That part is opposite a Meadows regular – Stephen Graham – in the incendiary four-parter The Virtues. They play Dinah and Joseph, two lost souls whose paths cross when Joseph confronts the demons that haunt him from a childhood in care.

Algar fulfilled another ambition in co-starring with Graham: “When I studied drama at the Factory in Dublin, we used to workshop scenes between Combo and Lol from This Is England. So suddenly to be working opposite Steve was amazing. I didn’t tell him that, obviously. Wouldn’t want to give him a big head.”

Ken Nwosu

Fresh from Killing Eve, he’ll star in ITV’s workplace bullying drama The Man.

Charly Clive

Also in C4’s Pure, the actor makes her screen debut after performing a comedy show about her brain tumour.

Jonah Hauer-King

He’s had roles in Howard’s End and Little Women and will star in BBC One wartime drama World on Fire.

Algar will be all over our TVs in 2019. Before The Virtues starts in late spring, later this month she’ll star in Channel 4’s Pure about an extreme form of OCD called “pure O”. After last year’s role in Desiree Akhavan’s The Bisexual, Pure is Algar’s second gay character in a row. “I think it’s because Shane made me shave off half my hair and dye it bleached blond, so I look quite edgy. I’m delighted if that’s become my niche!”

Later this year, we’ll see her play an army veteran in the BBC thriller MotherFatherSon, starring Richard Gere in his first major small-screen role. “On my first day, I got a scene with the back of his head,” she laughs. “I tell you what, that man has great hair.”

What does Algar do on her days off? “A lot of boxing. I’ve sparred since my teens. I’d love to use it in a role. I text my agent pretty much daily going, ‘Any boxing films?’”

Algar doesn’t get recognised yet. “No one has a clue who I am,” she says. “It’s great. Except when I go home to Ireland and my family are like, ‘Hmm, you look familiar. You’re the youngest, aren’t you?” She rolls her eyes. “I only moved away two years ago. Families, eh?” Michael Hogan

Books: Emma Dabiri

When Emma Dabiri was seven, instead of attending her first holy communion with her classmates, she created a “spiffy little anti-slavery pamphlet called Break the Chains” and presented it to her teachers. “As soon as you start reading black history, it’s difficult not to become politicised,” she says, sipping a coffee in the Hoxton Holborn hotel. “I started reading it very young. I experienced a lot of racism as a child, and reading about the global black struggle helped me contextualise what was happening to me.”

Growing up in 1980s Dublin to a white Trinidadian-born Irish mother and black Irish-Nigerian father, it’s no surprise that the social historian, broadcaster, former model and soon-to-be published author has interests that span pop culture, race, feminism and Yoruba folklore. Thanks to her presenting work on programmes such as Channel 4’s Is Love Racist? and BBC Two’s Back in Time for Brixton, she has become known for straddling the line between academia and accessibility.

Dabiri says she has been on this path for as long as she can remember, but her first significant step was leaving Ireland for a place at Soas University of London. She did a degree in African studies, followed by a master’s in development. After a stint working in Ghana, Dabiri found herself back at Soas, teaching and working on a PhD. She started writing a blog, and in 2013 wrote a post for Media Diversified titled Who Stole All the Black Women from Britain? It’s this piece that she cites as launching her into the public-facing world. Much like contemporary Afua Hirsch, Dabiri’s voice has been a refreshing counterbalance in a country still struggling to acknowledge its racist past in a postcolonial world.

Luke Turner

Out of the Woods is a memoir of the author’s religious upbringing near Epping Forest.

Jay Bernard

The poet’s debut collection, Surge, is a queer exploration of recent black British history, in Jamaican patois.

Emilie Pine

Notes to Self is a series of essays on topics such as addiction and infertility.

Her forthcoming book Don’t Touch My Hair is written “first and foremost” for those with afro hair: Dabiri, whose hair is more coiled than loosely curled, says: “I think if I had the ‘typical’ [loose] hair that’s associated with being mixed race, I would actually be a very different person.” Situated wittily in Dabiri’s own story, the book starts by tackling hair-texture discrimination, a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with colourism. Later chapters explore hair in relation to African mathematics, mapping and coding, and include fascinating stories of how slaves used braiding to communicate. The book, to be published in May, is likely to shift many stale conversations, and prove that black people’s concerns around hair are anything but superficial. Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff

Pop: Yellow Days

“I can’t switch off from music,” says George van den Broek, the 19-year-old multi-instrumentalist from Haslemere in Surrey who records as Yellow Days. “It’s my life. I’ve been working in this capacity for three years now and I think I’m becoming incredibly old-mannish.” He laughs. “It’s very slowly sucking the youth out of me.”

Van den Broek has a hefty back catalogue for a teenager, with an EP and an album, 2017’s Is Everything OK in Your World?, already in circulation. In both, he mined a down-tempo indie-R&B groove with low-key but compelling results, building up a youthful following on both sides of the Atlantic. (Donald Glover used a Yellow Days track in the season two trailer for his hit TV show Atlanta.)

But now, in his first releases since signing to a major label, his music is taking a (relatively) upbeat turn. The mellow sweetness that ran through the earlier records is amplified on recent singles such as How Can I Love You? He says the album he is working on now will be his “funky record”, moulded by deep immersion in “70s crossover jazz-funk and artists like Leroy Hutson, Al Green, and the Originals”.

Roses Gabor

Watch out for the vocalist’s debut album, out later this year, featuring artists including Sampha and MNEK.

B Young

The Afrobeats singer and rapper’s single Jumanji climbed the UK charts; another arrives soon.

Jade Bird

The songwriter has had US radio success with her British version of Americana.

In person, Van den Broek is a genial presence who swans into a cafe in north London 30 minutes late wearing a big smile and a long-sleeved T-shirt inspired by The Simpsons. Contrary to what his music might have you believe, he grew up in what he describes as “a very lovely, happy, supportive background”. “All the strife and pain has come through my own stupid little life,” he says, smiling ruefully. “My family are like a warm sofa that hugs you.” They supported his musical ambitions, which took root at 14 when he started writing “good” music (as opposed to the “terrible Ed Sheeran stuff” he’d come up with in earlier years). As well as singing, playing guitar and producing, he’s taught himself to play bass, keyboards, drums and a bit of sax.

Making music is hard work, van den Broek insists, but he can’t imagine doing anything else, even if it saps the youth out of him. “I would have really struggled to let go of childish dreams,” he tells me. “So I’m eternally grateful for the decisions I made to bring me to this point and I’m going to keep giving it everything I’ve got.” Killian Fox

Activism: Amatey Doku

Amatey Doku’s career in student representation had humble beginnings. As a member of his secondary school’s student council, he campaigned for better food options in the canteen. “My understanding of politics in a broader sense wasn’t very good at the time, but I’ve always tried to make things better for people,” he says.

Since then, Doku has broadened his scope. Now 23, he is the vice-president for higher education at the National Union of Students (NUS) and a member of For Our Future’s Sake, a student campaign group calling for a people’s vote on the Brexit deal. In October, he was one of the speakers at the 700,000-strong march for a new Brexit referendum in central London. “For me, standing on that stage, seeing those crowds of people and the passion behind the campaign was really moving,” he says. His current role has also given him the opportunity to have his say within parliament – he has twice given evidence at committee meetings on funding for higher education.

Amika George

Founded #FreePeriods to help young UK women who can’t afford tampons.

Paula Akpan and Nicole Crentsil

Started Black Girl festival, an event celebrating black British women that will return in 2019.

Paramjit Ahluwalia

The barrister represents society’s most vulnerable, fighting human trafficking, modern-day slavery and immigration crime.

At Cambridge University, where Doku graduated with a degree in sociology in 2016, he was president of his college’s union and later president of the university students’ union. Among the issues he advocated for was a campaign to repatriate a statue at the university that had been looted from Africa in the 19th century.

He came from an academic family – his grandfather is a professor at the University of Ghana and his father studied medicine in the UK – and so expectations were always high. “My parents put a lot of emphasis on being educated, especially being black,” he says. But, after learning of the black attainment gap in education through his studies, he felt a strong obligation to clear the path for others. “I understand the huge privilege I gained from going to Cambridge. You’ve got to make sure you use that to make change.”

In the long term, Doku hasn’t ruled out moving on to national politics: he is a staunch believer that our political system needs simplifying so it can be more easily understood by the public. But he won’t be taking the plunge any time soon. “I think it’s important that people going into politics have some experience of the real world,” he says. “I’d much rather work in the third sector, at charities or organisations that are trying to effect change, before that.” Amy Walker