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.

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 publishable standard. Her own work includes 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; three historical novels, and numerous articles on the techniques of writing fiction. She has led workshops and spoken at writers’ conferences across the north of England, including for the Arvon Foundation.

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

Frankie Bailey began her scriptwriting career in 1989, successfully squeezing through the narrow aperture of "sitcom" (Birds of a Feather) and out the other side to long-running medical and legal drama series (Casualty, Crown Prosecutor, and Peak Practice.) She has had two radio dramas successfully produced and is in the throes of producing a third. Frankie 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.

Keith Bennett is a poet, performer and playwright. He has published two collections of poetry, The Apricot Orchards of Maribor (Martin Blyth of Poole, 1998) and The Louisiana Molegrip (Dionysia Press Ltd. Edinburgh, 1999) for which he was sponsored by Scottish Arts. His next collection, 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.

Catherine Blyth is a writer and editor. She spent several years at Fourth Estate, the distinguished independent publisher, now an imprint of HarperCollins. There she edited and commissioned across the board, from literary to commercial fiction, and a range of non-fiction, working with award-winning writers such as Rachel Cusk, Susan Elderkin, Richard Francis, Laurie Graham, Virginia Ironside, Irma Kurtz, Hilary Mantel, and Carol Shields. Since leaving Fourth Estate she has written scripts for the BBC and Channel 5, and contributed to The Times, Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and The Literary Review. She continues to edit and ghost for leading publishers.

Charles Boyle worked as an editor at Time-Life Books for eleven years and at Faber and Faber for fourteen years. He has published six collections of poetry, and has been shortlisted for the Forward, Whitbread and T. S. Eliot awards. As well as poetry, he is interested in children’s and adult fiction.

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 ground-breaking 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.

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.

Soul Corporation by Robert Collins

Robert Collins published his first novel Soul Corporation, Heinemann (Random House), 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

Petra Cooper is a freelance script editor working in TV and film. Having spent a year working for an animation/computer graphics film company followed by a year as an arts reviewer, she moved to BBC TV as a Development Editor before turning freelance some years later. She has been involved in developing and script editing projects for independent TV companies including Pond Life (Channel 4), The Broker’s Man II (BBC), London’s Burning (ITV), and Beech is Back (ITV). For the last three years she has concentrated on feature film development work for a number of film organisations, and is currently Development Executive for the Northern Ireland Film and TV Commission, and a reader for the Premier, New Cinema Fund and Development Fund at the UK Film Council.

Maria D’Silva is a writer and editor. She worked for Egmont Children’s Books for a number of years and specializes in children’s fiction. She has written articles across several genres: from women’s and children’s fiction to health and travel which have been published in UK magazines. She is also a published author with a short story featuring in a Canadian anthology, A Flash of Red.

This novel is a strong evocation of adolescence in extremis and I loved every word.

Mary Scott, New Statesman on Rope Tricks, by Jocelyn Ferguson

Rope Tricks by Jocelyn Ferguson

Jocelyn Ferguson started writing for theatre and had several successes with both adult and Theatre-in-Education programmes before turning to fiction. Her first novel, Rope Tricks, was published by Virago and received much critical acclaim. In 1996 she won an Arts Council Writer’s Award for her second novel, Tree of Sails. She has taught Creative Writing for both Warwick and Keele Universities, and Literature at Stafford University, as well as English Literature and Drama in schools and colleges in London and Warwickshire. She now works entirely in fiction. She is married to the academic and critic Edward Larrissy.

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 have written many articles and reviews, many specializing in the relationship between the arts and science, for The Guardian, The 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, a book on the new science of bio-inspired materials, was published by Fourth Estate in August 2005. He is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary College, London, 2004-6.

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 speciality 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 UCE Birmingham and works as a freelance editor and researcher, most recently for the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries, University of Leicester. She hopes to finish her third novel The Flickering Lamp very soon!

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. She is poetry consultant and a board member of the leading literary magazine New Welsh Review. 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.

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, now 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, The Understudy, appears in New Writing 14 (Granta, 2006) and on the British Council's website.

John Harrison is a feelance 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. 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 book, about five months travelling through the Andes, including walking 700 miles on old Inca roads, will be A Walk to the Sun, published 2007.

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.

Daniel Jeffreys has worked in publishing and is a graduate in 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 is finishing his first novel.

Catherine Johnson has written nine novels for young adults. Her most recent is The Dying Game, to be published by OUP in 2007. 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.

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.) Marcy wrote and directed Intimate Memoirs of an Irish Taxidermist for Irish performer, Ben Keaton, which won the 1986 Perrier Award for Best Comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. Her stage version of Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally premiered at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in 2004. Marcy has written over twenty original plays for BBC Radio, including Everybody comes to Schicklgruber’s (1997 Silver Sony/Society of Authors Award for Best Radio Play); Drop Dead Gorgeous (2004 Bronze Medal for Best Play, New York Radio Festival) and The Uncertainty Principle (2001 Kurd Lasswitz Science Fiction Prize, Germany). 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).

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 fic 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.

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 The Dublin Review, Zembla Magazine, the anthology Tell Tales, and broadcast on Radio 4. He has 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. He is currently touring the country and teaching as part of the Tell Tales short story project. Tom is represented by Peter Straus of Rogers, Coleridge and White Literary Agency and recently received an Arts Council grant to complete a collection of short stories.

On Becoming a Fairy Godmother 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 is currently working on a commission from Granta. One of her short stories is being developed into a film starring Sean Bean and Michelle Yeoh.

Sara Maitland is The Literary Consultancy’s mentoring Coordinator. She has a wealth of experience in the field, including working on The British Council’s Crossing Borders Mentoring Scheme, as well as Lancaster University’s Creative Writing distance learning MA. For more information about TLC’s mentoring scheme for writers, click here.

Ian Nettleton has a Ph.D in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia where he has been teaching creative writing since 2001. He is also an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. He previously taught at Goldsmiths College. He has written and presented literary summaries for a BBC TV digital channel, appeared on Radio 4’s Open Book and presented and anchored an arts programme for a local Norwich radio station. He was also a consultant for the BBC’s Get Writing online creative writing programme. He has written a thriller set in Prague, which is currently with a literary agent and is working on a second, set in Australia.

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 in London with her husband and young daughter.

Anna Reckin worked as executive editor for HMSO Books on reference, professional and general non-fiction titles before going to the US to take an MFA in Creative Writing. She has taught Creative Writing at college level for the last ten years, most recently at the University of East Anglia. Her poems, essays and book reviews have been published in the US and the UK.

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 which 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.

Marsha Rowe first worked in magazines and newspapers, from Vogue Australia to the 1960s counter culture in England to publications such as Oz and Ink, which gave youth a voice. In 1972, she co-founded the national women’s magazine Spare Rib, which became the iconic publication of the women’s movement, and published novelists such as Rosalind Belben, Margaret Drabble, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker and Fay Weldon. She was one of the original directors of Virago, and later fiction editor at Serpent’s Tail, where she edited the works of a number of distinguished authors, including the first novels of Colm Tóibín and Susannah Dunn. As freelance editorial consultant, she works with new writers, such as Anne Lambton, whose short stories are to be published by Timewell Press in 2007, as well as with experienced authors. She also runs the life writing course Your Life’s Word at St Bride Institute (www.lifewriting.co.uk).

. . . brilliant editing . . . a mix of intelligence and sensibility.

Sheila Rowbotham Writer/Historian about Marsha Rowe

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. She lives in Birmingham and from 1998-9 was the city’s Poet Laureate. In recent years her work has diversified to include both fiction and drama. 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.

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 Red Dancer by 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 in the UK and Ecco in the US and has been translated into six languages. His second novel, The Velvet Gentleman, is forthcoming and has already been sold to Japanese, French and Italian publishers. He won an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 2004. Richard is an Associate Tutor at Goldsmith’s College, London, where he teaches on the MA in Creative and Life Writing. He has also reviewed books for the Financial Times and The Guardian. He has been a reader for TLC since 1999 and has been involved in numerous writing workshops, courses and seminars for TLC, Spread The Word and the Skyros Centre in Greece.

Anna South has worked in publishing for over nine 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.

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.

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, inspired by what is now called “the golden age of television drama”. Radio plays and short stories for BBC Radio Four led to television (episodes of Miracles Take Longer for Thames TV). More radio plays and features were followed by a BBC TV film, Phoebe and then by a 90-minute film, The Bell-Run, also for the BBC. In the nineties Julia was a regular writer on The House of Elliott, and a television version of her radio series The Cinderella Service (which was nominated for a Sony Award) was commissioned by Granada TV. Over the years more than a dozen short stories have been broadcast by BBC Radio Four. A collection of these entitled Fourteen From Four was published in 2004. Two one-woman stage plays, Jehosheba Hannaford and the Scarlet Woman and Love at Belisha’s have been produced. Julia has tutored several Arvon courses on writing television drama and radio drama and also, in 2006, ran a Writing for Radio week at the Almasarra Centre in Spain. A first novel, The Man Whose Name Escapes Me, was short-listed for the 2002 Peninsula Prize. Julia’s most recent short story for the BBC, Leo’s War, was read at the Bath Festival in February 2005 and broadcast the following week on Radio Four. Her latest radio play, The Tank Man, was broadcast in August 2006.

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

Rebecca Shtasel

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 and Mslexia, 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. These projects are funded by the Arts Council.

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.

Anne Williams worked for thirteen years as a fiction commissioning editor for Headline Book Publishing, until she decided to take a career break in June 2002. During her time there she was Publisher of the Headline imprint, joint publisher of the Review list and, most recently, Executive Editor. She commissioned and edited a number of Headline’s major commercial authors, including Sunday Times number one best seller Lyn Andrews, top ten contemporary women’s writer Sheila O’Flanagan and top ten thriller writer Faye Kellerman. She was responsible for commissioning and editing rising stars such as Orange Prize shortlisted Manda Scott and CWA Silver Dagger winner Barbara Nadel, as well as launching the careers of writers such as Ann Granger and Dee Williams. She also published a number of successful authors on Headline’s Review list, including Sara George, whose The Journal of Mrs. Pepys was serialized on Radio 4. Her latest publication, with co-author Mike Pentelow, was Characters of Fitzrovia (Felix Dennis/Chatto & Windus, 2001).

Alan Wilkinson specialises 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. 2006 saw the publication of Brim Full of Passion, the biography of Warwicks cricketer Wasim Khan.

He is working on an account of the recent expedition which re-located the source of the Nile, and a series of stories about a North Yorkshire rural beat officer.

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 Coventy, 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.

Olwen Wymark is a playwright and screenwriter. Her plays, which include Find Me, Strike Up the Banns and Nana, have been performed at theatres all over the country including The National Theatre, Royal Court, Tricycle, Bush, The Orange Tree, ICA, Almeida, The Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and The Citizens Theatre, Glasgow. Her television plays include In Suspicious Circumstances, British Slaves (a docudrama); film scripts include All Men are Mortal, Angel Eyes, Change of Address. Radio plays include Out of the Woods, Stories for Olga, The Game of Love in Mornington Crescent and adaptations of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and Solzynitsin’s Cancer Ward. She is an experienced teacher and mentor and has been Writer in Residence at The Theatre Royal, Bath and Wesleyan University, USA. She has taught on the BA Screenwriting courses at the universities of Sheffield and New York and on the BA Playwriting course at Birmingham University. She has run workshops on playwriting in London, the provinces, and the United States and she has also served on the New Writing Panel and Drama Panel of the Arts Council.

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