Writing Courses & Workshops Online & in London

Edith Wharton and Henry James had a keen eye for a well-designed and tastefully decorated house and both brought us depictions of splendid interiors in their novels set in ‘the Gilded Age’. We’ll discuss the changing tastes at the turn of the century, and how both authors used interior decoration to reflect the moral turn of their characters and the age.

The experience of living in Berlin in the early 1930s had a transformative effect on the life and work of Christopher Isherwood. In this course, we will discuss Isherwood’s masterpiece, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), and his autobiography Christopher and His Kind (1976), which reveals the real people behind the characters of Sally Bowles and Otto Nowak, and shines a light on the queer culture of Berlin Isherwood was unable to write about in the 1930s.

Join us for an exploration of the ways we experience global literatures of our time. Inter-generational memory is the focus of two prize-winning novels, The Vegetarian (2007) by Han Kang and The Island of Missing Trees (2021) by Elif Shafak. Unearthing the painful truths of history in the context of culturally/politically divided Korea and Cyprus, the authors deal delicately, and brutally, with love, the environment, patriarchy, resistance and the metamorphosis of the female body.

We will be looking at novels from recent years that explore various dimensions of culture and society, reading and discussing a brief and careful selection of novels in English from several countries, diverse in style and genre. Titles include Piranesi, Susanna Clarke's mysterious and 'weird' tale of secrets and lost texts, William Boyd's Trio, which follows the life of an actress, a film producer, and a writer obsessed with the suicide of Virginia Woolf, Small Things Like These by Clare Keegan, in which a coal merchant becomes involved with the fate of a pregnant teenager trapped in a Magdalene Laundry, and Michelle de Kretser's Theory and Practice follows the academic trajectory of a Sri Lankan feminist researching the novels of Woolf.

Share thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session on Friday 29 September with suggestions (contemporary fiction in paperback) and having read 'Story of the Forest' by Linda Grant. Meetings take place on 19/9, 24/10, 28/11, 30/1, 27/2, 27/3, 1/5, 29/5, 26/6.

From the theory of evolution to quantum physics and artificial intelligence, modern science has upended our understanding of the world and our place in it. How have writers of fiction responded to these radical changes?



We consider a range of fiction, including Frankenstein by Mary shelley, Angles and Insects by AS Byatt, Copenhagen by Michael Frayn and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

“It was the best of times…it was the worst of times.”



How did the Victorians see the world? They lived through one of the most dramatic periods in our history – and their literature reflects that. Victorian Visions looks at a wide variety of themes in Victorian culture: from the city to the home, from dreams to nightmares, from faith to doubt, from moralism to decadence, from ideology to empire.

Enjoy talking with other people about the things you have read? Want to share great stories, poems and drama? Come along and join the conversation. The group is led by a shared reading practitioner trained by The Reader Organisation.

Share thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session with suggestions (contemporary literary fiction in paperback) and having read 'Absolutely and Forever' by Rose Tremain. Monthly meetings take place on 26/9, 31/10, 5/12, 23/1, 20/2, 20/3, 8/5, 5/6, 3/7.

This class explores the wonderful world of 19th century American literature, reading classic texts to broaden knowledge of literary history through a range of influential novels, stories, and poems. Among the writers considered in their literary, political, and cultural contexts will be Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Kate Chopin.

Covering the early 19th century to the early 20th century, we will examine the East End and analyse how it was portrayed in works of fiction, thinking about how imaginative fiction and historical fact intertwine to create local legend.

What is a short story? Come and discuss its characteristics, its length, design, mood and style. What distinguishes it from other kinds of short narrative? We’ll compare short stories to other forms, such as myths, legends, anecdotes, fabliaux, parables, fables, and ‘tales’. We’ll look at some of the greatest practitioners including Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, and O’ Henry.

We will explore various themes related to ‘insanity’ and altered states of consciousness by examining a number of 19th-century works of fiction. Novelists and poets often had the greatest insights into the workings of the mind, and many Victorian psychiatrists cited works of fiction in their case studies. Among the authors we will cover are Charlotte Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Gogol, Herman Melville and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.