Festival Tutors for Warwick Festival of Writing

30th August – 1st September 2013

Including our Guest Speaker –

Gervase Phinn

Gervase Phinn We welcome Gervase, to our Warwick Festival of Writing, because as a Patron of NAWG he is a very special guest and I would like to give a personal thank you to him for coming to speak after the Gala Dinner and Awards Ceremony on Saturday evening when he will share his hilarious tales of life as a schools inspector in the Yorkshire Dales which will have you in stitches. Pam Fish, Chairman.

Professor Gervase Phinn taught in a range of schools for fourteen years before becoming an education adviser and school inspector.

He is now a freelance lecturer, broadcaster and writer, a consultant for the Open University, Honorary Fellow of St. John’s College, York and the Fellow and Visiting Professor of Education at The University of Teesside. He has published many articles, chapters and books and edited a wide range of poetry and short story collections and many academic texts . Additionally he has published collections of his own plays, poems, picture books and short stories, including his anthologies of verse : Classroom Creatures, It Takes One to Know One, The Day Our Teacher Went Batty and Family Phantoms. His books of stories for children, What’s the Matter, Royston Knapper? and Royston Knapper : The Return of the Rogue were published by Child’s Play and became best-sellers. His picture book Our Cat Cuddles is found in many a school library.

Gervase Phinn is probably best known for his best-selling autobiographical novels: The Other Side of the Dale, Over Hill and Dale and Head Over Heels in the Dales, published by Michael Joseph, which he read on the Radio 4 programme ‘Book of the Week.’ Head Over Heels in the Dales was a number one best-seller.

We now introduce you to our eight tutors:

 Linda Lewis

Linda Lewis has been working as a writer, full time, since 2003. She has a B.Sc. from the Open University.

Her main area of expertise is the short story, particularly for women’s magazines. Her stories have appeared in various publications including Take a Break (usually under the pen name, Catherine Howard), Woman’s Weekly, My Weekly, Yours, Ireland’s Own and The People’s Friend.

She began her career writing articles about the care and behaviour of tropical fish. These appeared in a wide range of magazines in the UK, USA and South Africa.

In March 2012, her book, THE WRITER’S TREASURY OF IDEAS was published. It’s a guide designed to help writers learn how to come up with all the ideas they will ever need for stories.  She has also written three other guides for writers which are available from her web site.

She has a blog at http://akacatherinehoward.blogspot.com where she writes about her life as a fiction writer and passes on tips and advice.

As well as tutoring for the Writers Bureau, she runs various other classes and workshops. In 2013, she will be teaching at the NAWG Festival of Writing and at Swanwick Writers Summer School. She also enjoys judging and running short story competitions.

To be successful as a writer, Linda says you need a thick skin to handle rejections, and perseverance so that you keep trying and never give up.

For more information, take a look at Linda’s web site – www.akacatherinehoward.weebly.com

You might also like to follow her on twitter or via her blog (details follow)

Twitter   http://twitter.com/writingiseasy Facebook  Linda Lewis Blog http://akacatherinehoward.blogspot.com

Steve Bowkett

Steve Bowkett was born and brought up in the mining valleys of South Wales. He started writing for pleasure at the age of thirteen, shortly after moving to the Leicester area, where he still lives.

Steve’s background is in education. He taught English for 18 years in Leicestershire High Schools, though is now a full-time writer, storyteller, educational consultant and also a qualified hypnotherapist.

In his time he has written fantasy and SF for teenagers, adult and teen horror, romance, mainstream fiction for pre-teens, fiction and non-fiction for younger readers and poetry for all ages. He has also published a number of educational books, principally in the fields of literacy, creativity, thinking skills and emotional resourcefulness. To date Steve has published over fifty titles plus numerous short stories and poems.   www.stevebowkett.co.uk

‘20 More Ideas to Boost Your Creativity’  (5.00pm – 6.30pm Friday)

Steve will be starting us off with this open to all delegates session on Friday afternoon in the Sutherland Suite, following the success of his workshop last year

 Simon Brett

Simon Brett is the author of over eighty-five books, including the Charles Paris, Mrs Pargeter, Fethering and Blotto & Twinks series of crime novels. His thriller, A Shock to the System, was made into a feature film starring Michael Caine.

Simon has also written a lot for radio and television, notably the series After Henry, No Commitments, Smelling of Roses and Dear Diary.

He has been Chair of the Society of Authors and is currently President of the Detection Club.

Lines of Enquiry (1.30 Saturday  Lecture Theatre)

In his hilarious rhyming one-man show Simon Brett skewers all the clichés of the Police Procedural, as seen in crime novels and on television.

Marvin Close

Marvin’s current book More Than Just A Game: Football vs Apartheid’ is on release worldwide, published by Harper Collins (St Martin’s Press in the USA).  Co-written with Professor Chuck Korr, it is the true story of how the political prisoners on South Africa’s infamous Robben Island turned football into an active force in their struggle for freedom.  It was Book of the Week in The Independent On Sunday and The Irish Times, and the subject of a documentary made by ESPN in the United States, and a half hour long BBC Radio 4 programme in the UK.

For BBC Radio Four, Marvin’s recent sixty minute documentary `Your Starter for Ten’ explored the stories and the personalities behind 50 years of University Challenge. It follows on from Marvin’s recent highly acclaimed BBC Radio Four documentary, `Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus`, which told the little known story of The Pythons’ attempts to make two TV specials in Bavaria in the early 1970s – in German. It was a disaster, though Marvin’s documentary was not.

Marvin has written for television, including ‘Soaps’ – see Saturday’s talk. He recently worked as Script Consultant on a major new Nickelodeon children’s TV series, HOUSE OF ANUBIS, which is currently on screen.

A former writer-in-residence at Manchester’s Library Theatre, Marvin’s stage plays include the award-winning comedy DOROTHY PARKER’S DEAD; the story of The Goons, `CRAZY PEOPLE’(co-written with John Chambers); an investigation of modern work, `WORKING’; a homage to Oliver Hardy, `TON OF JOLLITY’; and a political history of Hull dockers, `NO SURRENDER!’

For BBC Radio Four, he co-wrote two series of the comedy, `ARNOLD BROWN AND COMPANY’; and co-created and wrote two series of the nostalgia comedy series, `WHERE WERE YOU?’

In 2010, Marvin  worked as writer-in-residence at Tweendykes Special School in Hull, helping children with autism and learning difficulties improve their communication skills, and over the past two years, has visited over 30 primary and secondary  schools in Yorkshire and beyond, to deliver workshops aimed at inspiring creativity and self-confidence.

Marvin wrote and produced a BBC documentary short called `Invisible Eddie’, about his son’s experience of growing up with autism.

‘Soaps – The People’s Choice’. (3.00pm Saturday – Lecture Theatre)
From Brazil to Belarus and Norway to New Zealand, the major plank in TV broadcasting around the world is the soap opera. Why are they so popular? What are the tropes that make them tick? Marvin Close has written over 90 episodes of Emmerdale, Doctors and Crossroads, and storylined more than 200 episodes of Coronation Street. He has the inside line on how soaps are made, why they endure – and how he nearly helped set up a new soap series in Uzbekistan. This session will feature a wealth of personal anecdotes about what happens behind the scenes. On Saturday afternoon at the festival, Marvin will be entertaining us with this talk.

James Nash

Photograph (copyright) Alan Carmichael

James Nash is a writer and poet, and a long-term resident of Leeds. He is a well known provider of creative writing workshops in schools, universities and in the community, and is regularly called on as a host of literary events. Some Things Matter: 63 Sonnets is the fourth collection of his poetry – highlights from the three previous collections, along with some new non-sonnet material, were published by Valley Press as an ebook in April 2012, under the title A Bit of an Ice Breaker: Selected and Uncollected Poems.

Tim Wilson/Jude Morgan 

Tim Wilson has enormous experience as both writer and teacher. He took the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he studied under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, and has been a professional writer since 1986. His historical novels written under the name Jude Morgan have attracted rave reviews from Hilary Mantel, Tracy Chevalier and Joanna Trollope.

His novel about the Brontes, THE TASTE OF SORROW, was shortlisted for the Portico Prize and has been optioned for TV serialisation by BBC Wales. He has taught Creative Writing at City College Peterborough and elsewhere for 13 years, and is a Member of the Society of Authors.

Tim’s latest novel THE SECRET LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE by Jude Morgan, which will be the subject of his talk on Friday Evening, is his 30th published book.

Talking Shakespeare (8.30pm Friday – Sutherland Suite)

Author Jude Morgan will talk about the process of writing his latest novel THE SECRET LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, and explores the difficulties and rewards of writing historical fiction based on real people.

Pippa Hennessy

 Pippa Hennessy is a writer, a publisher at Five Leaves and a freelance typesetter and eBook designer.

She also teaches at Nottingham University on the Creative & Professional Writing and Humanities BA degree programmes.

She worked in the computing industry for twenty years as a programmer and a website developer before coming to her senses.

Roz Southey

Roz Southey is a novelist and music historian living in the north-east of England.  She is the author of the Charles Patterson mysteries, a series of historical detective novels set in Newcastle upon Tyne and published by Crème de la Crime (now an imprint of Severn House).

Her short stories have won a number of competitions; two have appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime (ed. Maxim Jakubowski, 2009 and 2011).  Her crime novella, Great Aunt Pepper, was published in November 2012 by AudioGo.

She has also published non-fiction books and articles, including local and family history, and academic papers. www.rozsouthey.co.uk