Tutors

All staff members and guests will be chosen on the grounds that they are not only excellent writers and tutors – but that they will contribute positively to a community atmosphere and are genuinely interested in helping facilitate a constructive and stimulating environment for participants.

We can guarantee that we will be as selective about the teams we take on our Literary Adventures as we are when it comes to picking readers for our core editorial services for writers (see our TLC Readers page)

TUTORS

Yvonne Battle-Felton (2022)

Published novelist, creative writing lecturer, podcast host 

Yvonne Battle-Felton, author of Remembered, is an author, academic, host, creative producer, and writer. Remembered, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2019) and shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize (2020). Winner of a Northern Writers Award in fiction (2017), Yvonne was commended for children’s writing in the Faber Andlyn BAME (FAB) Prize (2017) and has six titles in Penguin Random House’s The Ladybird Tales of Superheroes and The Ladybird Tales of Crowns and Thrones. Yvonne teaches creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University where she is a Principal Lecturer and Humanities Business and Enterprise Lead.  Writer of nonfiction and fiction, short stories, novels, children’s adventures, and children’s nonfiction, Yvonne loves stories in all of its forms and aims to create spaces for diverse characters on and off the page, screen, and stage. Host of Write Your Novel with Yvonne Battle-Felton, a write-along podcast series developed with New Writing North, Yvonne creates and hosts literary and storytelling events, and opportunities.

Paul McVeigh (2021)

Award-winning novelist, acclaimed tutor, and Associate Director of the Word Factory

Paul McVeigh’s debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Novel Prize and The McCrea Literary Award and was shortlisted for many others including the Prix du Roman Cezam in France. The Good Son was also Brighton’s City Reads 2016 and was given out around the UK for World Book Night 2017. Paul began his writing career as a playwright, in Belfast, before moving to London to write comedy. His shows toured the UK and Ireland including the Edinburgh Festival and London’s West End. Paul’s short stories have been read on BBC Radio 3, 4 & 5 and Sky Arts TV. They have also been published in The London Magazine and The Irish Times and in anthologies including Faber’s Being Various: New Irish Short Stories and Kit de Waal’s Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers.

Paul is associate director of Word Factory, ‘the UK’s national organisation for excellence in the short story’ (The Guardian), and co-founder of the London Short Story Festival. He is also a book reviewer for The Irish Times where he has also interviewewed authors including Booker winners Anna Burns and George Saunders, the editor of Belfast Stories and The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Writers which includes new work by Kevin Barry, Roddy Doyle, and Lisa McInerney. He regularly teaches on courses, at festival workshops, and at retreats around the world.

Romesh Gunesekera (2019)

Booker-shortlisted novelist, short story writer and poet. A nurturer of creativity and an experienced writers’ mentor.

Romesh Gunesekera was born in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, moving to England in 1971. He gained an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 1991. His first book, Monkfish Moon, a collection of short stories reflecting the ethnic and political tensions that have threatened Sri Lanka since independence in 1948, was published in 1992. Monkfish Moon, a collection of short stories reflecting the ethnic and political tensions that have threatened Sri Lanka since independence in 1948, was published in 1992.

Reef (1994), his first novel, won a Yorkshire Post Book Award (Best First Work) and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize. The book is narrated by a young Sri Lankan boy named Triton who is sent to work for a marine biologist, Mister Salgado. Forced to leave Sri Lanka by the worsening political situation, they move to London where Triton opens a restaurant.

The Sandglass (1998), his second novel, centres on the character of Prins Ducal, a Sri Lankan businessman, and his search for the truth about his father’s death. It was awarded the inaugural BBC Asia Award for Achievement in Writing and Literature. His novel, Heaven’s Edge (2002), is set on an island in the near future.

His latest works include The Match (2006), The Prisoner of Paradise (2012) and Noon Tide Toll (2013).

Romesh Gunesekera lives in London, but travels widely for festivals, workshops and British Council tours. In recent years he has held writing residencies in in Hong Kong, Singapore and Denmark, and in 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Tom Bromley (2018)

Experienced tutor, bestselling ghostwriter, novelist, and former commissioning editor in publishing. A dedicated writers’ mentor. 

Tom Bromley is an author, ghostwriter, editor and creative writing tutor. He is the author and co-author of ten works of both fiction and non-fiction: the novels Crazy Little Thing Called Love and Half a World Away; the Dead on Arrival series of crime books writing as Thomas Black; the non-fiction memoirs All in the Best Possible Taste and Wired For Sound; and the pop-culture books We Could Have Been The Wombles, Rock and Pop Elevens, The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures and Shopping While Drunk. Tom is also the internationally bestselling ghostwriter of a further fifteen titles: he has worked with pop-stars, politicians, Premier League footballers, soldiers, sporting champions and television celebrities on their memoirs, and on books about subjects ranging from economics to Tolkien. A former commissioning editor and publisher at Little, Brown and Pavilion, Tom has commissioned and edited over 100 titles. A long-standing reader and mentor for the Literary Consultancy, Tom also works for the Faber Academy, where he teaches their online Writing a Novel and Work in Progress courses, and wrote/teaches their shorter courses on Plot, Character, Setting and Reading Like A Writer. He is Director of Fiction at the Professional Writing Academy, where he teaches courses of Writing Crime and Finding Your Voice: Exploring Genre. Students who have gone on to get publishing deals include Joanna Cannon, Aoife Clifford, Asia Mackay, Jo Furniss and Katherine Debona.

In 2017, Tom was Festival Director of the inaugural Salisbury Literary Festival. A festival for readers and writers, it included authors Philippa Gregory, Sarah Winman, Gail Honeyman, Barney Norris and Kristina Stephenson, and events to celebrate the work of William Golding and Terry Pratchett.

Lesley Glaister (2017)

Novelist, creative writing tutor and experienced mentor. A real writers’ writer

Lesley Glaister is a British novelist, poet and playwright. She has written 13 novels, one play and numerous short stories and radio plays. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews, and is a regular contributor of book reviews to the Spectator and The Times.

Glaister’s first novel, Honour Thy Father (Bloomsbury, 1990) won the Somerset Maugham Award and a Betty Trask Award. Now You See Me was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction in 2002, and Easy Peasy was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award 1998. Her first play, Bird Calls, was performed at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, in 2003. Her latest novel, Little Egypt, was published by Salt in 2014 and was named the Sunday Herald Book of the Year 2014.

Glaister is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh.

Jacob Ross (2016)

Novelist, creative writing tutor, Associate Fiction Editor at Peepal Tree Press. Editor of the groundbreaking collection, CLOSURE.

Jacob Ross was born in Grenada, and has lived in Britain since 1984. He is a poet, playwright, journalist, editor, novelist and a tutor of Narrative Craft. He is the author of acclaimed short story collections Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999); co-editor with Joan Anim-Addo of Voice, Memory, Ashes (1998); co-author with Kwesi Owusu of Behind the Masquerade: The Story of Notting Hill Carnival (1986); Ridin’ n Risin  and Turf –  Anthologies of Short Stories with Andrea Enisuoh and editor of the Guardian Best Books-selected collection of Black British short stories, Closure (2015) with Peepal Tree Press, where he is Associate Fiction Editor.

Hailed as ‘a writer of formidable technical range and emotional depth’, Ross’s work has been critically acclaimed internationally. He currently lectures in creative writing and international literature in England and abroad. In 2006 Jacob Ross was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was one of the judges of the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize in 2008 and the Tom-Gallon Award in 2009. His first novel, Pynter Bender, was published in 2008, and his current novel in progress, The Village Above the Wind, won an Arts Council England Award.

Shelley Weiner (2015)

Acclaimed novelist, short-story writer and journalist with a reputation. An inspirational creative writing tutor and nurturer of new talent.

Shelley Weiner is an acclaimed novelist and creative writing tutor with many years’ experience nurturing new talent. Shelley has run masterclasses for the Guardian, Faber Academy, Peirene Press and Skyros Writers’ Lab, and has lectured on the Creative Writing MA at Anglia Ruskin University, as well as for Birkbeck College, the Open University, the Taliesin Trust, the British Council in Israel, and Durham University. She has also led workshops at Writers’ Centre Norwich and the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Her own creative work includes the novels The Audacious Mendacity of Lily Green, Arnost, The Joker, and The Last Honeymoon, and the creative writing guides, commissioned by The Guardian, Writing Your First Novel and Writing Short Stories. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies including Winter’s Tales, The Slow Mirror, Valentine’s Day, Mordecai’s First Brush With Love, and on BBC Radio 4. Shelley served as the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University and the University of Westminster, followed by her appointment as an Advisory Fellow.

Rebecca Abrams (2014)

Award-winning novelist, creative writing tutor and essayist. Inspiring the best writing across fiction and non-fiction.

Rebecca Abrams is the author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her non-fiction titles include When Parents Die, a classic in its field, and Three Shoes, One Sock and No Hairbrush, the best-selling guide to having a second child. Her novel, Touching Distance, was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize and won the Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Award (2009). An award-winning journalist, Rebecca is a former columnist on the Daily Telegraph and a long-standing reviewer for the Guardian. Born in 1963, she has lived in America and Switzerland and now lives in Oxford with her husband and two children.

Aki Schilz (Guest Tutor, Literary Adventures)

Director of The Literary Consultancy, writer, poet, facilitator. 

Aki Schilz is the Director of The Literary Consultancy, the UK’s longest-running editorial consultancy for writers, providing editing services, mentoring and literary events since 1996. She is a member of the Advisory Board for the award-winning experimental publisher Penned in the Margins, and a judge for the Bridport First Novel Award and the Creative Future Literary Awards for marginalised writers. Aki is a member of the #BAMEinPublishing network, and an advocate for improved diversity, representation, and accessibility in the literature sector. She is also a prize-winning writer and editor, and co-founder of the Saboteur Award-shortlisted #LossLit digital literature project.