Meet Writing a Novel’s Guest Tutors for January 2025
4 minutes read
We're delighted to introduce our guest tutors for the January 2025 iterations of our Writing a Novel courses.
Eimear McBride
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime & evening)
Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her second novel The Lesser Bohemians won the 2017 James Tait Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. In a 2018 Times Literary Supplement poll of 200 critics, academics and fiction writers, McBride was named one of the ten best British and Irish novelists writing today. Strange Hotel is McBride’s third novel.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime)
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You – the winner of The Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an NPR 2017 Great Read. Her second novel, Starling Days, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Her short work has appeared in several places including Granta, Guernica, The Atlantic, and NPR’s Selected Shorts. She is the editor of the Go Home! anthology.
Kate Maxwell
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime)
Kate Maxwell was born in London, studied English at Oxford University and has worked as a journalist, editor and broadcaster in London and New York. She now works freelance as a content consultant for brands, and writes travel features for newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Condé Nast Traveller, for which she is a contributing editor. Kate started writing her novel on a Faber Academy course and it was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize’s Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award. Virago published Hush in May 2022.
Sara Jafari
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (evening)
Sara Jafari is a British-Iranian author and editor. She is the author of The Mismatch and People Change (Penguin Random House, 2021 and 2023). People Change will be published as Things Left Unsaid by St. Martin’s Press in Spring 2025. Longlisted for Spread the Word’s Life Writing Prize, her writing has also been published in gal-dem and The Good Journal, among other publications. She is also a contributor of the essay collection “I Will Not Be Erased”: Our stories about growing up as people of colour (Walker Books, 2019), and Who’s Loving You (Trapeze, 2021). Sara also single-handedly runs TOKEN Magazine, a literary and arts print magazine featuring under-represented writers and artists. Sara has worked in the publishing industry for over six years, most recently working at Puffin, Penguin Random House where she worked as an editor, actively commissioning young fiction, middle-grade and YA/crossover non-fiction and fiction titles.
Jessica Andrews
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (evening)
Jessica Andrews is a novelist. Her work explores intersections of social class and gender in relation to the body. Her debut novel, Saltwater won the Portico Prize in 2020 and her second novel, Milk Teeth was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award in 2023. Her work is translated into seven languages. Her stage adaptation of BIFA winning and BAFTA nominated film Saint Maud by Rose Glass ran at Live Theatre in 2024. She is a Contributing Editor at ELLE magazine and she also writes for the Guardian, the Independent, BBC Radio 4 and the Architectural Review, among many others. Her writing has been featured on BBC Front Row, BBC Woman’s Hour and BBC Radio 3 and she has given guest lectures at the University of Sheffield, the University of Liverpool, the University of Kent, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and Texas State University. She was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Futures for writers under the age of 35 and longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2022. She co-runs literary and arts magazine, The Grapevine and co-presents literary podcast, Tender Buttons. Jessica is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at City University, London and she has also taught at ARVON, Litro, New Writing North and the University of Roehampton, among others. She is currently completing a PhD on representations of working-class women’s bodies within contemporary fiction through innovative literary forms.
Writing a Novel is designed to support aspiring fiction writers to develop their craft over six months, with courses in London (at Faber’s HQ in Hatton Garden), Newcastle and online.
A six-month programme of seminars, sessions will cover all the essentials of novel writing – including character, story, structure, plotting, voice, dialogue, conflict and more.
Find out more about the next iterations of Writing a Novel here.
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