Writing creative non-fiction

Paul Laffan is the author of The Fabricated Christ: Confronting What We Know about Jesus and the Gospels (Fortress, 2019) and Is He Out There? Debating the God Delusion (Sussex Academic, 2023). He has written several novels and ghosted several works of autobiography. He holds a BA in English Literature from Oxford and an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English from Florida State University in America. He taught writing and literature for six years at Florida State, and has also taught at Birkbeck, Morley College, the Mary Ward Centre and Lambeth College.

Julie studied at the University of Essex, the Central School of Speech and Drama and Dartington College. She has written several plays for young audiences for, amongst others, the Unicorn Theatre for Children. She currently writes articles about landscape, heritage and nature. Julie won the 2014 British Czech and Slovak creative writing prize for her personal essay about the Czech Poet and dissident Ivan Blatny.

Yvonne Singh was a staff journalist at The Guardian for over a decade, and her work has been published in that paper as well as The Observer, The Mirror, The London Evening Standard, the BBC World website, Marie Claire, Middle East Eye, Commonwealth Writers and The Big Issue among others. She contributed to the Know Your Place anthology that was featured in Guardian Weekend and in the Seaside Photographed exhibition that toured British art galleries in 2021. Her long read essay for The Guardian on her Caribbean origins was one of the paper’s most read in 2019 and her piece on a Trinidadian Hummingbird Sanctuary in November 2020 was praised in a Virago OurShelves podcast. Yvonne has also worked as an editor in a voluntary capacity for the Caribbean literary magazine Pree. Yvonne holds an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University – her debut manuscript received a distinction and was awarded second prize in the SI Leeds Literary Prize 2018. She was a judge for the SI Leeds 2020 prize. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Seán Ó Faoláin prize, longlisted for the Brick Lane Bookshop Prize and Black Spring Press, and have appeared in the acclaimed journal Southword.

Erica Buist has been writing features for the Guardian for over a decade. A memoir piece she wrote for Guardian Weekend ended up forming the basis for the first chapter of her debut book, This Party’s Dead. She has worked as a playwright for various theatre companies, an writer/ interviewer for the charity St Mungo’s, and is now working on her first novel. Erica has taught journalism at various universities including Cambridge, Goldsmiths, Lincoln, Exeter and Keele, and has led numerous courses with Guardian Masterclasses.

Vicky has been teaching creative writing at City Lit since 2018. She has also taught for the Open University, London South Bank University and the University of Greenwich, and she reads for the manuscript assessment agency The Literary Consultancy. Her short fiction has appeared in new writing anthologies published by Picador, Granta, Duckworths, Serpents’ Tail and Bloomsbury. Her nonfiction essay 'Into the Valley' was mentioned in Best American Essays, 2013. Her short story collection 'Live Show, Drink Included' was published by Holland Park Press in 2018 and is long-listed for the £10,000 Edge Hill Prize. One of the stories is in Best British Short Stories, 2019.