is the author of three highly acclaimed
novels, Curvy Lovebox, Crumple Zone and Hooky Gear, and was
named in 2003 as a h4 contender for Granta's twenty best young
British novelists of the last ten years. His fourth novel, The
Wife of a Man Who, has been published in France. The written
history of his Hungarian Jewish family was also published. As a
freelance journalist, he has contributed to a wide range of
newspapers and magazines, including a long-running series about
London for The Times. He has also written a walk for the Time
Out Book of London Walks, Volume 2, award-winning radio plays,
and short stories for anthologies. He has taught journalism and
creative writing for over ten years.
Ross Biddiscombe
is a journalist of 30 years'
experience, also an author, broadcaster, writing coach and PR
consultant. He specialises in writing about sport and television
and has worked for national newspapers like The Guardian,
monthly magazines including Golf Monthly, regional daily and
weekly newspapers and specialist and trade magazines. He has
also been a radio news reader/reporter and worked in various
roles for several satellite TV channels including National
Geographic TV. Ross has interviewed personalities as varied as
Muhammed Ali, the Duke of York, William 'The Fridge' Perry and
Seve Ballesteros. He has recently completed two acclaimed
biographies about the struggles of journeymen golfers and is a
regular contributor to titles including the Royal Television
Society's monthly magazine.
Jane Cassidy
started her journalism career as a
reporter
on local newspapers on the south coast and in London before
working
as a writer and editor at Macmillan magazines. Moving to become
news editor at The Big Issue magazine in London enabled her to
focus on investigations and campaigning journalism. She led the
news team which won a Mind Journalism Award for best reporting
of mental health issues, while the editorial team won the CRE
Race in the Media Award. She worked with homeless teenagers on a
writing project which became a book about their experiences.
Her freelance work has appeared in a range of national
newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The
Independent and The Observer, and she has written a regular
investigative column for The British Medical Journal. She has
worked as an assistant producer/producer on current affairs
documentaries for Channel 4 and the BBC and for an artist on a
Turner Prize project examining the impact of reality TV.
Gavin Evans
has been a journalist for over three
decades. He started out as a news reporter and then worked as a
feature writer, columnist and night news editor, while stringing
as a foreign correspondent. Later, Gavin worked as a freelance
feature writer and broadcaster (radio and television) and also
as a sub-editor. His academic background is in economic history
and law, and my PhD is in politics. In recent years he has
written for a number of UK publications including The Guardian,
The Independent, The Daily Mail and the New Internationalist,
and he also writes for the Mail and Guardian in South Africa.
Gavin has written six books, the latest of which is 'Black
Brain, White Brain' (Thistle and Jonathan Ball), which exposes
the fallacies of racist IQ theory. He is currently completing
his next book, 'Mapreaders and Multi-taskers' on genes and
gender. He has lectured at LSJ and at Birkbeck (University of
London) for more than a decade, and also assists with the MA
journalism course at the University of Cardiff.
Paul Gogarty
has been providing features for all the
national travel pages for over 20 years. He has been a travel
editor on several publications, was chief travel writer at the
Daily Telegraph for a decade and regularly presented on BBC 1's
Holiday programme. He is the author of two award-winning
travelogues and his latest book is a psychoanalytic look at
sporting legends entitled 'Winning at all costs - Sporting gods
and their demons'.
Lynne Hackles
is a butterfly writer, flitting from
genre to genre. She has sold over four hundred short stories to
women's magazines in the UK, Australia and Scandinavia. She has
written greetings cards, newspaper advertisements, comic strip
stories for children, a novel for pre-teens and been a
ghostwriter. She currently has three how-to-write books out and
is busy being a journalist and article writer, under three
different names. Lynne has given talks and held workshops all
around the UK and is a tutor for Writers' News home study
courses.
Margaret James
is a novelist and journalist who has
written thirteen published novels and is a regular contributor
to the UK's bestselling monthly publication for authors, Writing
Magazine. Margaret's latest novels are a trilogy of stories set
in Dorset - The Morning Promise, The Long Way Home and The Penny
Bangle, were published in October 2007.
Andrew Knight
began his journalism career in Scotland
on the Aberdeen Evening Express, where he won a number of
writing awards, including Young Scottish Journalist of the Year,
and later became the paper's features editor. He moved to BBC
Scotland in Glasgow in 1989, but returned to print journalism in
the early 1990s and spent five years as assistant editor of The
Bath Chronicle, principally responsible for the paper's features
and entertainments coverage. He has had widespread
freelance writing experience and been heavily involved in
journalism training for the past 10 years with a variety of
newspaper groups. He held a full-time post as editorial training
manager for Trinity Mirror's Western Mail & Echo newspapers
in Cardiff for two years prior to becoming a full-time
freelance tutor and lecturer.
is a published author of over thirty five
historical and contemporary titles published by F A Thorpe under
her pseudonym Valerie Holmes. Her work encompasses crime,
adventure and romance. She has also written articles and
had work published as a ghost-writer. She is a previous winner
of David St John Thomas Charitable Trust’s Annual Ghost
Story competition, run by Writing Magazine. She is an
experienced creative writing tutor of distance learning courses
and manuscript appraisals, including work for the R. N. A.’s
New Writers' Scheme. She was shortlisted for the award with her
first published title. As a reader for the Historical Novel
Society she reviews both adult and children’s books. She
is a member of the Society of Authors, The Crime Writers’
Association and the Romantic Novelists’ Association
(Valerie’s ‘Hannah of Harpham Hall’ was short
listed for the Romance Prize in 2006). Valerie's latest book,
'Moving On', was shorted listed for the 'Love Story of The Year
Award 2011 at this years RNA.
blogs about music, film, and culture
for the New York Times and Intelligent Life. He has written for
TIME Magazine and the Economist and also teaches
at City University London. He is a former senior fellow at
Mother Jones Magazine, and a former assistant editor at Pop
& Politics. He was an education reporter for Los Angeles
Times community newspapers from 2000 to 2004. He's worked on
multimedia stories for telegraph.co.uk and Mother Jones.
He's written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice,
and Dazed & Confused magazine.
Tony Padman
has been a news and features journalist
since 1999. After five years in news for local, regional,
national and Polish newspapers, he travelled to Belarus where he
worked as a news correspondent. Returning to London he turned to
features, writing stories on health, religion and education. He
now specialises in entertainment journalism for national
newspapers.
Sarah Burton
teaches creative writing and has taught
undergraduate courses in the Theatre Studies Department at the
Royal Holloway and in the English Department at Goldsmiths. Both
involved tutorials, seminars, lectures and supervision and
support.
She was for many years a television drama script editor and also
read and reported on prose submissions for Eastern Arts' Write
Lines scheme. Sarah is also on the board of tutors for the
University of Oxford's Department for Continuing Education,
having completed with credit their course in Effective Online
Tutoring.
She has published two non-fiction titles for adults: Impostors:
Six Kinds of Liar (Viking hardback, 2000; Penguin
paperback, 2001) and A Double Life: a Biography of Charles
and Mary Lamb (Viking hardback 2003; Penguin paperback
2004). Impostors has been translated into four
languages and A Double Life was short-listed for the
Mind Book of the Year. She has also written extensively for BBC
History Magazine and review books (fiction and
non-fiction) for the Times, Spectator, Guardian and
Independent. Her first children’s book was The
Miracle in Bethlehem: A Storyteller’s Tale
(Floris paperback, 2008) and she has contributed a short story
to the Wow! Anthology (Scholastic, 2008). She recently
completed a second children’s book and a novel for adults.
Jane Purcell
started out in children's publishing at
Random House. Since then she has written topical comedy for
radio and sketch comedy for television (Steve Coogan and Smack
the Pony) and journalism for newspapers and magazines She has
written numerous plays and series for Radio 4 and has a
television comedy pilot under option. Jane is currently writing
a Woman's Hour series. She is also a tutor with the Open
University.
Wendy Richmond
originally trained in Fine Art, turning
to writing when it became easier to combine this with raising a
family. She returned to study as a mature student in her early
30s gaining a degree in Philosophy, and later an MA in
Scriptwriting. A Hawthornden Fellow, she has tutored creative
writing for decades, edited poetry magazines, dabbled with
filmmaking, and had interludes with theatricals. Active for many
years in organising literary events as well as tutoring, she now
leads a quieter life and has recently returned to her art
– this sits nicely alongside the poetry. She says there is
no greater delight than to read a truthful but crafted poem that
engages the reader on that special journey – even more so
when it has been written by an LSJ student.
Nick Alatti
Born in Birmingham, Nick cut his
journalistic teeth at Cater's News Agency as a court and sports
reporter. He later moved to the Birmingham Daily News where he
became a senior reporter and a feature writer. His proudest
journalism moments were working on the Lockerbie disaster, the
Kegworth air crash and the release of the Birmingham Six. He
also did a number of celebrity interviews including Pavarotti,
Joan Collins, Ella Fitzgerald, Lenny Henry, Fry and Laurie and
Simon Rattle. Nick worked on the short-lived 'The Planet on
Sunday' before moving to Devon and working on the Exeter Express
and Echo. In 2005 he turned freelance to spend more time with
his young children. Nick has recently written for the Sunday
Express, the Mail on Sunday, New!, Fresh and Practical Family
History magazines as well as subediting for Country Gardener
magazine.
career in journalism began with financial,
trade and business publications, moving into national tabloid
and broadsheet newspapers, niche health titles, mass market and
glossy magazines. She has written about all aspects of lifestyle
including fashion and interiors, health and fitness, food and
travel, wellbeing and relationships. Her editing experience
includes four years as Time Out's Sell Out (consumer-lifestyle).
She has written Psychologies magazine's first branded book, Real
Confidence (published by Capstone/Wiley in February 2016) and is
currently working on Real Ambition as well as continuing to
contribute to the magazine. Lorna's first play was short-listed
for the Verity Bargate award, and she was on attachment to the
Soho Theatre for one year. She has recently performed her work
at the Chelsea Arts Collective, the Lion & Unicorn theatre and
Battersea Arts Centre. Lorna's lectures and workshops in
journalism for the London School of Journalism draw on her
interest in psychology and aim to inspire students to find their
unique, authentic writing voice.
