Readers

At TLC we work with an excellent team of highly skilled editors, writers and poets, many of whom have received particular acclaim. Some specialize in very specific genres, like children’s stories, or fantasy, others read across a wider range of work, but all have the particular sensitivity and skills needed to critique the work of others.

Our readers form an incomparable team. Their many achievements are too numerous to list fully here, but between them they have published numerous books, won dozens of awards, commissioned work for leading publishing houses and literary agencies, produced award winning theatre and radio plays, tutored creative writing at UEA, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths and the OUP, worked as writers in residence around the world, and more . . .

We work carefully to match your manuscript to the best reader for you. Do let us know if you would like your work read by a particular reader, though please note that as nearly all our readers are working writers and tutors, they may not be available year-round.

Torc of Moonlight by Linda Acster

Linda Acaster specialises in commercial fiction. She spent six years on the reading panel for the New Writers’ Scheme administered by the Romantic Novelists’ Association, offering advice on bringing work to a publishable standard. She has led workshops and spoken at writers’ conferences across the north of England, including for the Arvon Foundation. Her own work includes numerous articles on the techniques of writing fiction, over seventy short stories in genres as diverse as women’s, horror, crime, fantasy and science fiction, published in magazines in the UK, US and Europe, and three historical novels. Her latest, Torc of Moonlight, is a contemporary psychological thriller.

Sue Atkinson was a teacher and researcher in primary education for several years publishing academic books and articles, and also books for teachers and children, both fiction and non-fiction. She runs workshops on writing for children and tutors over the internet. She has written several ‘life writing’ books and Climbing out of depression (Lion 1993) has been translated into 12 languages. Her latest book Breaking the chains of abuse (Lion 2006) is about her journey of recovery from childhood sexual abuse.

I was impressed by your thorough analysis – extremely encouraging to a lonely key-tapper.

John Stevenson

Elspeth Barker O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

Elspeth Barker is a novelist and journalist. She was educated in Scotland and at Oxford. Her novel O Caledonia (Penguin) won four awards and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. She has reviewed extensively and written features for the Independent on Sunday, Guardian, Sunday Times, Observer, LRB, TLS, Harpers & Queen, Scotland on Sunday, Vogue, etc. She edited the anthology Loss for Dent/Orion in 1997. Since 1992 she has worked as tutor and lecturer in creative writing at Norwich School of Art (MA and BA), and has tutored on over a dozen Arvon courses as well as other writing courses in the UK, Europe, and US. She has published short stories in numerous anthologies and was visiting professor of fiction at Kansas University in 1999. She has read and lectured at festivals and universities around the world. For three years she was a judge for the McKitterick and Sagittarius prizes. She is currently finishing a novel for Penguin and writing for The Independent on Sunday, Country Illustrated and The Literary Review.

Frankie Bailey began her scriptwriting career in 1989, successfully squeezing through the narrow aperture of "sitcom" (Birds of a Feather, Love Hurts, Lenny Henry Show) and surviving relatively unscathed to go on to write for medical and legal ‘precinct’ drama series (Casualty, Crown Prosecutor, Peak Practice and Heartbeat). Her recent Radio 4 drama (Signs and Wonders) received glowing press reviews.

She has a distinguished background in English Literature and History, but it hasn't held her back in the least! She also specialises in historical fiction and biography and is currently writing a stage play about American novelist and playwright Carson McCullers.

Martyn Beardsley is a writer of fiction and non-fiction for children and adults. His Sir Gadabout books have been published in several countries, and were turned into an award-winning series for CITV. He has also written Deadly Winter, a biography of the Arctic explorer and Trafalgar veteran Sir John Franklin, and co-edited Gratefull to Providence, the diary of an eighteenth century apothecary-surgeon. Several of his other children's books, both fiction and non-fiction, also have a historical theme. Smuggler! and The Last Duel were both published by Barrington Stoke, who specialise in books for children who are reluctant readers, or suffer from dyslexia or other reading difficulties.

Keith Bennett is a poet, performer and playwright. He has published three collections of poetry, The Apricot Orchards of Maribor (Martin Blyth of Poole, 1998), The Louisiana Molegrip (Dionysia Press Ltd. Edinburgh, 1999) for which he was sponsored by Scottish Arts and The Clockwork Poetry Machine (Dionysia Press Ltd, 2006). He was a runner-up in The National Poetry Competition and his work has been read on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Solent. He is a mentor for the National Association of Writers in Education and runs workshops for all ages and poetry surgeries for more advanced writers. He has lectured part-time at Portsmouth University and presented papers on the art and craft of writing at Bath Spa, Middlesex and Surrey Universities. His plays, The Assassin’s Assistant and Brusher Mills, have been performed by Forest Arts.

The Art of Conversation
by Catherine Blyth

Catherine Blyth Catherine Blyth is a writer and editor. She spent several years at Fourth Estate, working on literary and commercial fiction, and a range of non-fiction. Since leaving Fourth Estate she has written scripts for the BBC and Channel 5, and contributed to national publications including the Daily Telegraph and The Times. Her first book, The Art of Conversation, is to be published by John Murray and Gotham (an imprint of Penguin US), and will be translated into five languages. She is currently working on her next book for John Murray.

The Book of Love by Sarah Bower

Sarah Bower is a novelist and short story writer. She has published two historical novels, The Needle in the Blood and The Book of Love. The Needle in the Blood was Susan Hill’s Book of the Year in 2007. Her short fiction has appeared in QWF, The Yellow Room, Spiked and Buzzwords among others. She has a creative writing MA from the University of East Anglia, where she now teaches. She is also a tutor in creative writing for the Open University. Sarah is currently working on a contemporary novel and a short story collection.

Matthew Branton is the author of four recent novels, The Love Parade, The House of Whacks, Coast and The Hired Gun, all published in the UK by Bloomsbury and translated into Japanese and Russian overseas. He was involved in the controversial New Puritans project (Fourth Estate, 2000) and his fifth novel was recently published in a groundbreaking online venture with the Independent on Sunday, for whom Matthew also reviews regularly. He has lectured in creative writing as far afield as the University of Hawaii, and has worked with The Literary Consultancy for several years.

Isabel Brittain has a Masters degree in Children’s Literature from the University of Surrey, Roehampton. Whilst working for The Arvon Foundation, an organisation dedicated to the development of creative writing, she edited their education journal and education project and organized the Arvon International Poetry Competition. She has done research for Bookstart, has taught primary-aged children in inner London and worked on literacy issues with deaf children.

Tom Bromley has been working in publishing for over ten years, including five years as a commissioning editor for both Little, Brown and Anova Books. He is the author of eight books: the novels Crazy Little Thing Called Love and Half A World Away (Pan Macmillan), We Could Have Been the Wombles (Penguin), The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures and Shopping While Drunk (John Murray); Rock and Pop Elevens (Michael O'Mara) and two ghostwritten works.

Marginalia, Poems by Wayne Burrows

Wayne Burrows’ first collection, Marginalia, appeared from Peterloo Poets in 2001, and his work has featured in New Writing 12 (Picador, 2004) and New Writing 15 (Granta, 2007), as well as the Forward anthology for 2002, Poetry Review and many other magazines and anthologies. He recently completed The Protein Songs, a sequence about genetics for use in Retina Dance Company’s Eleven Stories For The Body, Distance To Our Soul, which toured the UK and Europe over 2005/6. He was recently appointed editor of Staple New Writing and currently lives in Nottingham.

Tim Clare is a writer, stand-up poet and musician, who performs all over the UK. His book about thwarted ambition, We Can't All Be Astronauts, is due out from Ebury Press in mid-2009. He has written for The Guardian and The Times, presented the Channel 4 series How To Get A Book Deal, and has appeared on Radio 1 and 2. He's performed at many festivals including Glastonbury, Leeds and Reading, and Latitude.

Soul Corporation by Robert Collins

Robert Collins published his first novel, Soul Corporation (Heinemann) in June 2004, to huge acclaim. Time Out described it as ‘an impressive debut . . . a passionately concerned meditation on the phoniness of celebrity and the plugged-in world’. Robert was also the co-writer of a screenplay, Flynights, which received special acclaim in the Orange Prize for Screenwriting, 1998. He is now a full time writer, working on his second novel.

Kieron Connolly gained a Diploma in Screenwriting from the National Film & Television School and subsequently worked as a reader for FilmFour Productions. Hourglass and Metalstasis, two animation short films that he co-wrote, won the Royal Television Society Best Student Animation 2001 and the Public Choice Award at the British Animation Awards 2002 respectively, as well as other awards at many international film festivals. A feature screenplay of his was shortlisted for the Pathe/Orange Screenwriting Award 2000. Apart from screenwriting he has written interviews for the Daily Mail Weekend Magazine and currently works as a reader for the Mail on Sunday books department.

When I realised there were flaws in the structure of my third novel . . . I asked The Literary Consultancy for help. They came up with brilliant solutions . . .

Norman Russell, author of Jackson and Bottomley period detective novels. Member of the Crime Writers Association

Stephanie Cross was educated at the University of Cambridge, where she gained an M.Phil in English Studies (Distinction) in 2005. Since 2003 she has been a regular reviewer of fiction for papers including the Daily Mail, the Times Literary Supplement and the Observer, and she has also worked as a freelance manuscript consultant to the David Godwin Associates Literary Agency. In 2006 she was recognised by the Arts Council, East’s “Escalator” talent scheme as one of the ten best emerging prose writers in the Eastern region.

Peter Forbes initially trained as a chemist and worked in pharmaceutical and popular natural history publishing, whilst writing poems, and articles for magazines such as New Scientist and World Medicine. A stint as Southern Arts Writer-in-Residence (1984-6) led to the editorship of the Poetry Society's Poetry Review, Britain's premier poetry magazine, where he nurtured very many young poets in the early stages of their career, including Glyn Maxwell, Sophie Hannah, Gwyneth Lewis and Don Paterson.

He has written many articles and reviews, many specializing in the relation between the arts and science, for the Guardian, Independent, Financial Times, New Scientist, World Medicine, Modern Painters, The Listener, New Statesman, and other magazines.

Since leaving Poetry Review in 2002 he has been writing reviews and writing and editing books. He has edited three poetry anthologies: Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (Viking, 1999), We Have Come Through (Bloodaxe, 2003) and All the Poems You Need to Say I Do (Picador, 2004). In 2001 he published a translation of Primo Levi's The Search for Roots (Penguin Press). The Gecko's Foot (Fourth Estate, 2005), on the new science of bio-inspired materials, was long-listed for the Aventis Prize. He was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary University of London 2004-7.

His new book, Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage, will be published by Yale University Press in October.

Entering the Tapestry including Jacqueline Gabbitas

Jacqueline Gabbitas is a freelance writer. Her poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies, Oxford Magazine, Magma, Entering the Tapestry (Enitharmon), This Little Stretch of Life (Hearing Eye) and Images of Women (Arrowhead Press) and was recently commended in the New Writing Ventures Awards. She is an editor on Brittle Star magazine, and a lecturer at UEL. Jacqueline has an MA in Writing from Sheffield Hallam University and now attends courses and workshops at The Poetry School, where she also works. A pamphlet, The Mid Lands, is due from Hearing Eye.

Rose Gaete was an agent for six years at the prestigious Wylie Agency where she worked with authors such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Ahdaf Soueif, Jon McGregor and Paul Theroux. She is currently an editor and reader for a variety of publishers including HarperCollins, Bloomsbury and Atlantic Books. She has an MA in English Literature from Cambridge University. Her particular specialty is contemporary novels.

Wist by Jackie Gay

Jackie Gay has written two novels, Scapegrace (2000) and Wist (2003), both published by Tindal Street Press. Wist appeared twice in the 2003 Guardian list of Books of the Year. She has co-edited three anthologies of short stories: the prize winning Hard Shoulder (Tindal Street Press, 1999) with Julia Bell; England Calling (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001) also with Julia Bell; and Her Majesty (Tindal Street Press, 2002) with Emma Hargrave. She was Clare Morrall’s editor for the Man Booker shortlisted Astonishing Splashes of Colour. Jackie teaches creative writing at Birmingham City University, supervising MA and PhD students and also works with the new National Academy of Writing, delivering modules and advising students. She also works as a freelance editor and researcher, most recently for the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries, University of Leicester on a major project Rethinking Disability Representation. She is working on what she hopes will be the final draft of her third novel The Flickering Lamp.

The Never-Never by Kathryn Gray

Kathryn Gray is a highly acclaimed poet. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2001 and in the same year featured in Anvil New Poets 3. Her debut collection of poetry, The Never-Never, was published by Seren in June 2004. Kathryn’s work as a critic and poet appears regularly in many leading newspapers, magazines and journals including The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Mslexia and Agenda, and she has led many workshop groups in London. Her art and theatre criticism has also been widely published and she is currently the London theatre critic for Wales’s national daily The Western Mail. She has recently received a major Arts Council Bursary and is editor of New Welsh Review.

New Writing 14,
Granta, 2006

Vicky Grut started out on the staff of the independent publishers Lawrence and Wishart in the late 1980s. Titles she edited there, and subsequently as a freelance, ranged from academic texts to a political thriller by MP Peter Hain, ex-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Wales. She was a creative writing tutor for Birkbeck College for several years, and co-taught an Arvon Foundation course in 2001. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Random Factor (Pulp Faction, 1997), Reshape Whilst Damp (Serpent’s Tail, 2000), Valentine’s Day: stories of revenge, (Duckworths, 2000), Resist (www.pulp.net, 2005) and New Writing 13 (Picador, 2005). In 1999 she won an Asham and an Ian St James Award, both for short fiction, and in 2006 she was the winner of the Chapter One Promotions International Short Story Competition. An extract from her forthcoming novel, Understudy, appears in New Writing 14 (Granta, 2006) and has featured on the British Council's website. She teaches creative writing at London South Bank University.

Charlotte Guillain specialises in children's literature. She has worked in children's and educational publishing for over a decade and now works as a freelance publisher and author of children's non-fiction. She also gets a close up view of the world of children's trade fiction through the experiences of her husband, Adam Guillain, who is an author and storyteller.

Where the Earth Ends by John Harrison

John Harrison is a freelance writer and traveller, and also a lecturer specialising in adventure cruise travel in Polar Regions, Latin America and other remote areas. He writes fiction, travel books, history, reviews and journalism. He has twice been a winner of the national travel writing compeition: the Alexander Cordell Award. His travel book Where the Earth Ends was a Sunday Times Book of the Week. When not travelling, or swimming with icebergs in Greenland, he lives in Cardiff. His next two books will be out in May 2010. A travel book: Cloud Road is about five months travelling through the Inca heartland in the Andes, walking 700 miles on old Inca roads. He second is a history of the exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula, based on the memoirs of little known sailors, sealers, whalers and explorers who slowly uncovered the last continent.

Gill Harvey has been writing books for children and young people for over twelve years. This has involved a gradual shift from writing non-fiction (she worked as an in-house writer for Usborne Publishing for five years) to writing commissioned fiction, and from thence to developing her own. She has written two novels under her own name – Orphan of the Sun (Bloomsbury) and Love in Luxor (Piccadilly Press) – and shorter stories for Kingfisher and Barrington Stoke. In addition to these she has written nine of Scholastic's Heartland series under the name of Lauren Brooke, two of Hodder's Young Animal Ark series under the name of Lucy Daniels, and three of Macmillan's Magic Pony Carousel series under the name of Poppy Shire.

Blackmoor
by Edward Hogan

Edward Hogan is from Derbyshire.  His first novel, Blackmoor, was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award 2009.  He runs creative writing workshops at universities and colleges across Britain, and currently works at the University of Sussex.  He is working on his second novel.

Daniel Jeffreys has worked in publishing and is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His short stories have appeared in AMBIT and The London Magazine, his story The Bamboo Forest was described as ‘an undiscovered gem’ in The Observer's paperback review. He currently works as a freelance feature writer for Esquire and reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and The Tablet. He is finishing his first novel.

A Nest of Vipers
by Catherline Johnson

Catherine Johnson has written nine novels for young adults. Her latest books include A Nest of Vipers, published by Corgo and Arctic hero, a biography published by Barrington Stoke. She has also written for film and TV and her most recent feature was Bullet Boy, a BBC/Shine production released last year. Catherine has worked for Centerprise, Book Trust, and as writer in residence in Holloway prison. She has mentored writers for the British Council and for the Royal Literary Fund.

Robin Jones read Russian and Philosophy at Exeter and Westminster universities. He was a Russian translator in his early twenties where among other projects he translated the state judicial inquiry into the tragedy at Chernobyl for Piers Paul Read’s book Ablaze (Secker & Warburg). He was then a freedom of expression campaigner for writers world wide at Index on Censorship and International P.E.N. and then an international literary scout for publishing groups in eleven countries. During this time he also worked for the only Russian literary agency in this country – Synopsis Literary Agency. For the last two years he has been a literary agent working with J.G. Ballard, George Alagaiah and Simon Callow at Maggie Hanbury’s agency, and is now at Imrie & Dervis working with authors such as Orange Prize shortlisted author Joolz Denby.

Jamie Joseph is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, and works as a senior commissioning editor in academic publishing. He has published short stories in a number of collections and his story 'You jump your heart out!' was described as 'very funny and sad' by the Independent on Sunday. Jamie also reviews books for the Times Literary Supplement and is currently finishing his first novel.

Marcy Kahan is a playwright. She grew up in Montreal, has a degree in English from Somerville College, Oxford and trained in theatre in Paris with the LeCoq teachers, Philippe Gaulier and Monika Pagneux. Her screenplay, Antonia & Jane was the first BBC TV film to be given theatrical release by Miramax (Gold Plaque Award – Best Original Feature Film Screenplay – 1991 Chicago Film Festival.) Her stage work includes: 20 Cigarettes (National Youth Theatre at the Soho Theatre, 2007); the stage version of Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally (Theatre Royal, Haymarket/UK tour, 2005) and Intimate Memoirs of an Irish Taxidermist (Edinburgh Festival and Donmar Theatre; 1986 Perrier Award). Marcy has written over twenty original plays for BBC Radio, including 20 Cigarettes (2007 Tinniswood Award nomination); Drop Dead Gorgeous (2004 Bronze Medal for Best Play, New York Radio Festival); The Uncertainty Principle (2001 Kurd Lasswitz Science Fiction Prize, Germany); and Everybody comes to Schicklgruber’s (1997 Silver Sony/Society of Authors Award for Best Radio Play); Her radio dramatisations include a 10-hour War & Peace (co-writer: Mike Walker; 1998 Talkie Award for Best Drama) and Huckleberry Finn (BBC/CBC Toronto co-production). During 2007, Marcy joined twenty writers and composers for the Jerwood Opera-writing programme, based at Aldeburgh. She teaches playwrighting at Birkbeck College, RADA and the Actor’s Centre in Soho.

Sarah Keen was in publishing for a number of years, most recently for Headline, where she worked for five years in all, finally as senior fiction editor working on a mixed and varied list of authors including most genres from crime fiction to sagas, chick lit to literary fiction. During her time there she worked with many of their bestselling authors, editing authors such as Sunday Times bestseller Faye Kellerman and award-winning crime writer Barbara Nadel. She has also reviewed fiction for Time Out. She moved to Devon over three years ago, and now works as a primary schoolteacher and freelance editor.

Greenfly! by Tom Lee

Tom Lee is a writer, teacher and editor based in London. He is a graduate of the Goldsmiths College MA in Creative Writing and Life Writing and his stories have been published in Zoetrope All-Story in the United States, The Dublin Review and Prospect magazine, among others, as well as being broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He also worked for a number of years as a script reader and editor for, amongst others, Intermedia Film, Spitfire Pictures, Mission Pictures and Working Title 2. Tom is represented by Peter Straus of Rogers, Coleridge and White Literary Agency and his short story collection Greenfly! will be published by Harvill Secker in February 2009. He lives in South East London and teaches at Goldsmiths and the Open University.

Sundowners
by Lesley Lokko

Lesley Lokko trained as an architect and holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of London, but gave up both architecture and academia to focus on writing full-time. Her debut novel, Sundowners, a Guardian Top 40 novel, was published in 2004, followed by Saffron Skies in 2005. Her latest novel, Bitter Chocolate, published by Orion and described by the Daily Mail as ‘a corker of a read!’ was published in January 2008. She is currently at work on her fourth, due out early next year. She divides her time between Ghana and Hackney, though not simultaneously!

A sexy, sophisticated page turner. Pour yourself a Mai Tai and enjoy!

Viv Groskop, Books Editor, Eve Magazine.
This month’s must-reads.

A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland is a writer of considerable stature. Her first novel, Daughter of Jerusalem (1978) won the Somerset Maugham Award, and her fifth, Home Truths (1992) was short listed for the Scottish Writer of the Year Award. She has also published four collections of short stories – one story, A Fall from Grace, is anthologised in The Penguin Book of Modern Women’s Short Stories, (Penguin 1990). Sara is also a theologian and has published a wide range of non-fiction, as well as writing for radio and television. In October 2001 her radio play Other Voices was broadcast on Radio 4. In 1995 she became the last writer to work with Stanley Kubrick on his AI project. Sara is currently exploring ways of being a modern ‘solitary,’ and the contemporary meanings of silence. On Becoming a Fairy Godmother was published by Maia Press in June 2003 and she has a new collection of short stories also published by Maia, 2008. ‘Far North’, the title story of this collection, has been made in to a film directed by Asif Kapadia, starring Sean Bean and Michelle Yeoh and a new non-fiction title A Book of Silence was published by Granta in 2008.

Melissa Marshall worked for literary ‘super’ agent Ed Victor before becoming an editor at Simon & Schuster where she worked for five years on women's fiction, literary fiction, crime and thriller. She commissioned, edited and published authors such as Jules Hardy, Annabel Dilke and Kate O'Riordan, and worked closely with many others including Adriana Trigiani, Will Rhode, Victoria Glendinning, Jennifer Weiner and Kathy Lette. She is now an independent editor and reviewer for books and film, freelance editing fiction and non-fiction for publishing houses including Canongate, Macmillan, Orion, Hodder and Atlantic. Melissa also assesses books for their small screen and big screen potential for the BBC, and does consultancy work for unpublished authors through an Arts Council initiative as well as TLC.

Sally O-J is a freelance editor who has worked with a wide range of authors, from absolute beginners to an established TV scriptwriter. She is comfortable in genres as diverse as science-fiction, biography, historical, romance and mystery, as well as non-fiction. She works closely with writer's agent Meg Davis (MBA Literary Agents Ltd) and has been the reader for award-winning novelist Sarah Waters (Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet) on all her books. Previously, Sally was a journalist and editor in the music business, and has written and edited scripts for broadcast, album sleeve notes, and online features.

Antonia Parkin has worked for several years as a children’s book editor at Frances Lincoln Publishers. She has a wide range of expertise covering poetry, story books and fiction and non-fiction picture books. She is also a freelance writer of educational books for children and a translator. Among her recent publications are translations of Jacques Duquennoy’s award-winning French picture books Ghost Party and Loch Ness Ghosts. She lives on the Wirral with her family.

Anna Reckin followed a degree in Chinese at the University of Cambridge with a career in publishing. As Executive Editor at HMSO Books she worked as project manager and development editor on handbooks, guidebooks and reference titles for a wide range of clients, including the V&A, English Heritage and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She later took an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota, and she has continued her interest in the practicalities and process of writing by teaching classes in non-fiction, fiction and poetry at US universities and currently through Continuing Education at the University of East Anglia. As well as teaching, she works as a freelance editorial consultant and recently completed a PhD on space, place and landscape in contemporary American poetry. Her essays, poetry and book reviews have been published in the UK and in the US, most recently in Shearsman and Modern Poetry in Translation. Other interests include plants and gardening, mind-body-spirit and personal development issues and the visual arts.

The Readers at The Literary Consultancy are hand picked, first class and terrific talent spotters.

Lennie Goodings, Virago Press

Jo Rogers is Head of Creative Affairs at Scion Films: recent film credits include The Constant Gardener starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, Working Title’s Pride and Prejudice with Kiera Knightley and Matthew McFaddyen, and Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: a Cock and Bull story starring Steve Coogan. She was formerly Head of Development at Fragile Films, where she developed films including Spiceworld, An Ideal Husband (with Rupert Everett, Cate Blanchett and Minnie Driver), The Importance of Being Earnest (starring Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Reese Witherspoon and Judi Dench) and recent animated feature Valiant, for Disney. She has a slate of films of her own in development, some of which she is co-writing.

Cynthia Rogerson is a poet, short story writer and novelist. A Californian, she has lived in Scotland with her family for more than 20 years. Her work has been published extensively in the last few years in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Some Kind of Embrace, An Anthology of New Writing Scotland (1998), After the Watergaw (Scottish Cultural Press 1998), The Black Book (Wordsinc, 1999) and Scottish Book Collector (2000). In 1999 Cynthia was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Bursary to support her while writing her first novel Upstairs in the Tent, published by Headline Review, 2001. She also runs a variety of workshops and teaching sessions on Creative Writing throughout the year and is a member of the Scottish Arts Council board, Arvon, and Art Link, an organisation that makes the arts accessible to the disabled. In the last few years she has had stories commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio Scotland and more stories published in anthologies and magazines. She is currently working on a new novel with a grant from the Scottish Arts Council. Cynthia was the winner of the 2008 VS Pritchett Memorial Prize for her short story, A Dangerous Place.

Sibyl Ruth’s first poetry collection, Nothing Personal, was published in 1995 by Iron Press. A chapbook, I Could Become That Woman (Five Leaves) followed in 2003. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and have been broadcast on Radio and TV. From 1998-9 she was Birmingham city’s Poet Laureate. In recent years her work has diversified to include both fiction and drama, as well as literary translation and feature journalism. She has taught creative writing for the Open College of the Arts and the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Lifelong Learning. From 2000-2005 she organised the literature programme at mac (the Midlands Arts Centre). She is a member of the editorial advisory panel of Tindal Street Press. Sibyl won first prize in the 2008 Mslexia Poetry Competition.

Michal Shavit is an editor at Penguin Press. Prior to editing Michal was a literary agent for five years, most recently at the prestigious Wylie Agency, where she worked with both fiction and non-fiction authors including Martin Amis, Elmore Leonard, Ali Smith, Rachel Cusk, Amanda Foreman, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, and A.M.Homes.

Jeremy Sheldon is a script reader for Miramax films and works as a script editor for a number of clients including The Irish Film Board. His collection of short stories, The Comfort Zone, was published by Cape/Vintage in 2002 and his first novel, The Smiling Affair, was published in 2005, also by Cape/Vintage. Jeremy is a tutor on the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck College, University of London.

The Velvet Gentlemanby Richard Skinner

Richard Skinner is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA. His first novel, The Red Dancer, was published in 2001 by Faber and has been translated into seven languages. His second novel, The Velvet Gentleman, was published in France in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Prix Livres & Musiques. He has written a book of non-fiction – a writer’s handbook entitled Fiction Writing: The Essential Guide to Writing a Novel, published in 2009. His poetry has appeared in First Pressings and Staple magazines and has been adapted for music. He won an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 2004. Richard is a tutor at Goldsmiths College, London, where he teaches on the MA in Creative & Life Writing. He has been a reader for TLC since 1999 and has been involved in numerous writing workshops, courses and seminars for TLC, the Faber Academy, Spread The Word and the Skyros Centre in Greece.

Anna South has worked in publishing for over twelve years and is as experienced with fiction as she is with non-fiction. During her seven years at Penguin UK she worked on all the adult imprints – from Michael Joseph to Viking – most recently as a Commissioning Editor at the Penguin Press. The authors she published there include top ten best-selling writer Simon Jenkins, journalist Stephen Glover, the late Ian Hamilton and the movie critic Gilbert Adair. She also worked extensively on the Modern Classics lists commissioning dozens of translations of works by authors such as Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud and Albert Camus. Anna now works as an editorial consultant and reader for a wide range of different publishers including Chatto and Windus, Picador, Penguin and Constable Robinson, and also for the William Morris Literary Agency. In addition she’s written a number of introductory pieces for a new hardback series, Collectors’ Classics, and edited the best-selling Penguin anthology Poems of the Great War, and was one of the judges for A & C Black’s 2007 New Fiction Competition.

Who can believe it? A paid-for service that actually does what it says on the tin.

Debbie Owczarek

Gillian Stern works as a Literary Editor, following many years as a Commissioning Editor. She works with all the Literary Agents at Curtis Brown, reading, critiquing, and editing novels across the genres. She reads novels that the agents have signed or are thinking of signing and provides constructive edits, and her opinion on how a novel works/does not work and how it could move forward. She works on books that are definitely going to be published, and which may also be the author's second or third novel.

Gillian provides detailed opinions, and is well known for her constructive approach and ability to help authors move forward with their work. She also works with Luigi Bonomi and Associates, A M Heath, The Literary Consultancy and YouWriteOn as well as directly with authors who know of her work and approach her directly for a constructive edit. She has worked on many well-known and very successful contemporary novels.

Who Writes This Crap? by Joel Stickley & Luke Wright

Joel Stickley is a writer and performer. His work has been featured on Radio 4, Radio 3, BBC7, BBC Scotland, ITV and BBC Choice. As a member of critically acclaimed poetry collective Aisle16, he has performed at Glastonbury, the Edinburgh Fringe, Port Eliot Lit Fest, the Latitude festival and a whole clutch of literary events across the country. Aisle16's comedy theatre show, 'Poetry Boyband', was named as Time Out's Critics' Choice of the Year in 2005. His first book, Who Writes This Crap? was published in hardback by Hamish Hamilton in 2007 and is scheduled for a Penguin paperback release in 2008. The Guardian described it as "an inspired piece of parody." Joel has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and specialises in comic fiction.

Ashley Stokes was educated at St. Anne's College, Oxford and the University of East Anglia (where he took an MA in Creative Writing). He now teaches creative writing at UEA and is a distance learning tutor for the Open College of the Arts as well as an associate lecturer in creative writing for the Open University and the Norwich School of Art and Design. His stories have appeared in This is, Pretext, EM, Hard and Other Stories, Take 20, Signals 3, Spiked, England Calling (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), Birdsuit and The Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan, 2001). He has written book reviews for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Telegraph, The Big Issue and The Good Book Guide. He won a 2002 Bridport Short Story Prize for The Suspicion of Bones. He’s currently writing a novel and co-writing a radio series. A new story Post-Leading Man is forthcoming in Bonfore magazine.

I am awed by your reader’s philosophical, novelistic and teaching skills. I can’t thank her enough.

Y.J.M Bonavero, Something in the Sea, Bloomsbury, 2006

Fourteen from Four by Julia Stoneham

Julia Stoneham began her career as a stage designer and started writing in the late seventies. A number of plays and short stories broadcast on BBC Radio Four led to television work that included two BBC films, The Bell-Run and Phoebe and four episodes of The House of Elliott. Of sixteen radio plays, the latest, The Tank Man was broadcast in 2007. Her radio drama series The Cinderella Service was nominated for a Sony Award. ‘Blue Afternoon', Julia’s most recent short story, was read by Martin Jarvis on Radio 4 in January 2008. Julia has tutored several Arvon courses on writing television drama and radio drama and for the Ways With Words Literature Festival at Dartington. ‘Fourteen from Four’, a collection of short stories previously broadcast by the BBC was published in 2005. A first novel, The Man Whose Name Escapes Me, was short-listed for the 2002 Peninsula Prize and her new novel Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings, published by Allison and Busby, came out in September 2008.

Your comments have given me so much to think about, I haven’t been able to think about anything else!

Rebecca Shtasel

101 Things to Do Before You're Old and Boring by Helen Szirtes

Helen Szirtes is a freelance editor and author of children’s books. Following an English degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, Helen spent two years teaching in Italy. On her return she fell quickly into publishing, getting a job at Bloomsbury, where she cut her teeth on a range of dictionaries and business books. A few years later she moved across into the children’s department, editing a wide and varied list that included picture books, poetry, young illustrated fiction and nonfiction, young adult fiction and the Harry Potter series. Helen has worked with many wonderful writers and illustrators, such as Philip Reeve, Alexander McCall Smith, J.K. Rowling, Sue Limb, Chris Priestley, Mary Hooper, Peter Bailey, David Roberts, Michael Terry, Jackie Kay and Michael Rosen. In 2005 she co-authored the children’s bestseller 101 Things to Do Before You’re Old and Boring with her partner Richard Horne, and they are about to embark on a fourth book in the series, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2010. Helen also writes poetry and is working on her first novel for children.

Mary Tomlinson was Fiction Editor at Bloomsbury Publishing for nearly twenty years. For much of that time she worked with Liz Calder on her distinguished list, editing writers such as John Berger, Will Self, Patricia Highsmith, Brian Moore and Joanna Trollope. Since 2007 she has been editing fiction on a freelance basis, and is writing a novel. She has reviewed fiction for the Literary Review and literary biography and literary criticism for the Times Higher Education Supplement.

Zenobia Venner has been Poet in Residence at Stoke Park Hospital, Bristol and also at Dorchester Library, where she worked with stained-glass artist Martin Donlin. She has also been assessor for the Creative Writing and Performance course at Bower Ashton College of Art, Bristol. She was closely involved in setting up both the Avon Poetry Festival from 1985-91, and the Marks and Spencer residency for poets in homes for the elderly in Bristol. In the 1980s and 90s she read and performed her poetry solo and with ensembles of poets, and shared platforms with Bristol Black Writers. She has read on radio, in chapels, museums, a fire station, a tent, and with different configurations of musicians. She continues to read, most recently at the Drum Theatre, Plymouth, the Rosetta Life Hospices performance event in Bridport and in the Beaminster Festival. She has been published in numerous pamphlets and magazines including Fire, Mslexia and Scintilla, and is currently working on two collections, one in collaboration with an artist. Since 2001 she has run writing workshops and poetry cafes with a colleague in Dorchester, and writing workshops at a mental health day centre in Bridport.

Beneath the Diamond Sky by Christopher Wakling

Christopher George Wakling was born in 1970. After studying English at Oxford, he worked as a farm hand, teacher and lawyer. He has published four novels: Towards the Sun (as Christopher George), The Undertow, Beneath the Diamond Sky and On Cape Three Points. They are all available in the UK. Some have also been published in the US, and others are available in translation for Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian readers. Christopher is the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Bristol University. From time to time he teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation, and writes travel journalism for The Independent. Married with two children, he lives in Bristol, where he is at work on a new novel.

Tessa West's first book was Prisons of Promise, a work of non-fiction based on her long career working in prisons. Over the last ten years she has written three novels (The Estuary, The Reed Flute, Companion to Owls). These are all set in East Anglia where she lives and are evidence of her particular interest in place, identity and belonging. She is currently working on a novel set in a prison. A keen cyclist, she has also compiled cycle guides and contributed travel articles to magazines. She has just completed an MA in Writing the Visual, for which her final project was The Other Vikings, a hand-made art book containing poems about women in the Viking age.

Sarah Westcott worked for 15 years in literary publishing at such prestigious houses as Jonathan Cape, Vintage, The Harvill Press, Anchor and Doubleday – and as a result, has in-depth and intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the publishing house. As managing and acquiring editor at Vintage, she worked with authors such as John Pilger, A.S. Byatt and Marina Warner, at Anchor she was the paperback editor for Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman, and as a senior commissioning editor for fiction and non-fiction at Doubleday, authors included Alison Fell, Robert Edric, Eleanor Bailey, Jay Rayner and Jason Webster. Recently, she moved to the West Country to set up a business, but she continues to work as a freelance reader and editor.

Now Then Lad,
Constable & Robinson

Alan Wilkinson has specialised in non-fiction and historical subjects. He has written three company histories and compiled two collections of Great War correspondence, including “Thank God I’m Not A Boy!”, The Letters of Dora Willatt, 1915-18 (Hull U Press, 1997). He has also scripted commentaries for 200 TV documentaries, and a number of Emmerdale episodes. His travel features have appeared most recently in the Wyoming-based American Cowboy. In 2004 he was appointed Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence in Orlando, Florida. His ghosted biography of Warwickshire batsman Wasim Khan, Brim Full of Passion, was Wisden’s Cricket Book of the Year, 2007. His most recent publication is the ghosted memoir of rural bobby P.C. Mike Pannett, Now Then Lad (Constable & Robinson). He has just been offered a new deal with Hodder to write two more in the series.

Louise Wise worked in the commissioning department of an academic publisher for seven years and has an MA in Modern Literatures in English from Birkbeck College, University of London. She also has wide-ranging experience as a freelance fiction editor. Her passion is literary fiction but her bookshelves also contain volumes of contemporary poetry, literary criticism, gender studies, cookery books (though she never cooks) and a small but growing collection of Japanese Manga.

Stephen Wyatt is a writer, teacher, lecturer and script editor. His TV credits include episodes of Dr Who, Casualty and House of Elliott; radio includes many adaptations including Sketches by Boz, Gilbert without Sullivan and Dr Brighton and Mr Harding. For theatre he has written for West Yorkshire Playhouse, Hen and Chickens, Man in the Moon and the Soho Theatre, among others. He has also written for young people’s theatre in Coventry, York, Greenwich, Half Moon and Nottingham Playhouse. As a teacher and script editor he has lectured in drama, television drama and screenwriting at universities throughout the UK and Europe and taught at the Arvon Foundation, Central School of Speech and Drama and Rose Bruford College.

The Road from Damascus by Robin Yassin-Kassab

Robin Yassin-Kassab has a first class BA in English Literature and an MA with distinction in Creative Writing. His highly praised debut novel, The Road from Damascus, was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2008. He is currently working on his second novel. As a journalist he has written for the Big Issue, the Observer Woman magazine, the FT magazine, The National (Abu Dhabi) and the News (Pakistan). He has lived and taught English in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Syria, Turkey and France. Robin has read at the Edinburgh and Wigtown Book Festivals, and appeared several times on national radio.

This ambitious debut novel is an eye-opener on what it is like to be a Muslim post 9/11...richly evocative in its descriptions of multi-cultural London.

Daily Mail

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