TLC is delighted to welcome three new mentors onto our popular online mentoring programme, Chapter and Verse. Chapter and Verse is designed to fit around a busy lifestyle to support writers to completion of a writing project. Writers are hand-matched to a suitable mentor from our list, and receive detailed feedback by email from their mentor over the course of six sessions of 10,000 words of prose each (or the equivalent in short stories/poetry). At the end of the feedback sessions, mentees are invited in-house to TLC to meet with our Director Aki Schilz, a literary agent, and a publisher, to learn more about the submissions, pitching, and publishing processes, and to get up-to-the-minute information about what the market currently looks and feels like, and how a book gets from final draft to print-ready. Also included in the competitive price (£1,950 + VAT) is a full manuscript assessment within six months of completing the six online feedback sessions, so that at the end of the programme, you have a full, edited draft of your manuscript. The programme was set up by Rebecca Swift and Sara Maitland in 2007, incorporating TLC’s gold standard manuscript assessment method into a sustained programme for writers focussing on a book project. It has seen many writers to publication, but its main focus is to support writers with objective, professional feedback from a first-rate editor and to ‘graduate’ with a completed manuscript, and with a much improved arsenal of technical creative writing skills.
Julia Forster
Julia Forster is a writer and publisher with over twenty years experience across a broad range of roles. As a writer she has written fiction and non-fiction and is currently represented by C+W agency. Her most recent book is a coming-of-age novel, published in 2016 with Atlantic Books called What a Way to Go, and also in 2016, Julia was awarded a K Blundell Trust Award from the Society of Authors for her third book which she is now working on. Julia now works for Literature Wales where she sits on their bursary panel, helping to award bursaries to both emerging and established writers. She has worked in the publishing industry across the UK, including a stint in a literary agency in Soho. She also works in the marketing and PR for independent poetry publishers, Nine Arches Press. Julia mentors novelists and runs career development workshops for authors. As a journalist and critic, her writing has appeared in Agenda, Arts Professional, PN Review, Resurgence, New Welsh Review, The Author, Western Mail and Writing in Education.
Julia is interested in mentoring writers working on contemporary fiction, literary fiction, or non-fiction
Andy Lowe
Andrew Lowe is an author and editor who has written for The Guardian and Sunday Times, and contributed to numerous books and magazines. His own published books (in the psychological thriller genre) include Savages, The Ghost and Three Tense Tales. He lives in London, where he writes, edits, and coaches youth football. Andy is also a self-publishing consultant and social media specialist – he currently has 15.7k followers on Twitter and is an active member of the digital community. He previously served as Partner Member and Watchdog for the Alliance of Independent Authors, a global nonprofit association for self-publishing indie authors. Andy is also a trained copy-editor and proofreader, and has edited work for many self-publishing authors, including award-winning fantasy author Ben Galley.
Andy Lowe is TLC’s resident self-publishing mentor and is interested in mentoring writers with an interest in self-publishing who are writing thrillers, SFF, and commercial fiction
Thalia Suzuma 
Thalia Suzuma is a Dubai-based editor and scout. Until 2015, she was Head of English Publishing at Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing. There, she published prize-winning authors such as Saud Al Sanousi and Mai Al Nakib. The publication of Saud Alsanousi’s The Bamboo Stalk sparked interest in the international media and provided a different narrative on the human rights abuse of migrant labourers in the Gulf. At BQFP, Thalia worked on a list of fiction and non-fiction, identifying talent across the Middle East and working to promote it internationally. Her aim was to choose books that would be the most resonant, accessible and sometimes controversial to an international audience. The books she published, unlike many of their authors, did not get denied visas at airports. Thalia was previously at HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan in London, and has worked in publishing for ten years. She has worked with such authors as Cecelia Ahern, Lauren Weisberger, Tony Parsons, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Rosie Thomas and Jeffrey Archer. She also published the best-selling sequel to The Devil Wears Prada whilst at HarperCollins. Thalia is bilingual French-English and has a working proficiency in Arabic. She has run creative writing and publishing workshops at Oxford, UCL and Southampton University.
Thalia heads up TLC Middle East where she and her team accept manuscript assessment submissions from writers based in the MENA region. For mentoring, she is interested in working with writers of literary and commercial fiction, and women’s fiction, with a special interest in Middle East-set narratives
How to apply
To request any of the mentors above, any of our other mentors, or to express interest in enrolling on Chapter and Verse, please send a sample (around 2,000 words) of the work in progress, a brief synopsis or summary of the project, and a short covering letter outlining how far along you are, and what you are hoping to achieve, in an email to Aki Schilz: . We can accept fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry or short stories. Full t’s and c’s here.
If you are interested in our manuscript assessment service, please email Joe Sedgwick on . Full t’s and c’s here.
