Aki Schilz is a writer, editor, and poet. Born in Osaka, Japan, she moved to the UK in 1987 and now lives in London. She is a Queen's Ferry Press Finalist (Best Small Fictions), has been featured in the Wigleaf Top 50 (2015) selected by Roxane Gay, and is the winner of the inaugural Visual Verse Prize, supported by Andrew Motion, and the inaugural Bare Fiction Prize for Flash Fiction, judged by Angela Readman. Her short fiction and poetry have been shortlisted for a number of prizes and have featured in print (3 of Cups, Synaesthesia Magazine, Year's Best Weird Fiction IV, Popshot, InkSweatTears, The Colour of Saying, Kakania, An Unreliable Guide to London, Severine) and online (theNewerYork, The Bohemyth, Annexe Magazine, Cheap Pop Lit, The Vagina Project, Mnemoscape Magazine, And Other Poems).

Aki is a judge for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award, and is on the judging panel for the Creative Future Literary Awards for marginalised writers. She is a member of #BAMEinPublishing and a Speaker 4 Schools, sits on the Advisory Board for the award-winning Penned in the Margins and is a Trustee of Poetry London. In 2018, Aki was named one of the FutureBook 40, a list of innovators in UK publishing, for her #BookJobTransparency campaign and her work at The Literary Consultancy. She has also been nominated for an h100 Award, and shortlisted for the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize for Women in Publishing.

Aki is the Director of The Literary Consultancy, the UK's first and leading editorial consultancy for writers. She is co-founder of the Saboteur Award-shortlisted #LossLit digital literature project with Kit Caless (Influx Press) and editor of LossLit Magazine: losslit.com