Meet Writing a Novel’s Guest Tutors for Autumn 2024

Nicola Dinan

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime)

Nicola Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur and now lives in London. She studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University before training as a lawyer. Bellies, her debut, was shortlisted for the Mo Siewcharran prize. Nicola is a graduate of Faber Academy’s Writing a Novel course.

Leone Ross

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime)

Leone Ross’s third novel, This One Sky Day (Faber/FSG) was published to critical acclaim in 2021. Her first novel, All the Blood Is Red, was longlisted for the Orange Prize and her second, Orange Laughter, was chosen as a BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour Watershed Fiction favourite. Her short fiction has been widely anthologised and her 2017 short story collection Come Let Us Sing Anyway was nominated for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and the OCM BOCAS Prize.

The Guardian has praised her ‘searing empathy’ and the Times Literary Supplement called her ‘a pointilliste, a master of detail…’ Ross has taught creative writing for twenty years, at the Arvon Foundation, University College Dublin, Cardiff University and Roehampton University in London, as well as at Faber Academy. She is editor of Glimpse, the first Black British anthology of speculative fiction, published in Autumn 2022 with Peepal Tree Press.

Sophie Mackintosh

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime & evening)

Sophie Mackintosh was born in South Wales, and is currently based in London. Her fiction, essays and poetry have been published by Granta, The White Review, The New York Times and The Stinging Fly, among others. Her short story ‘Grace’ was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize, and her story ‘The Running Ones’ won the Virago/Stylist Short Story competition in 2016.

Sophie’s debut novel The Water Cure was published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in Spring 2018 and by Doubleday in the US in early 2019, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Her second novel Blue Ticket was published in Summer 2020, and her third novel Cursed Bread, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, in Spring 2023. She was included on the 2023 Granta Best Of Young British Novelists list.

Claire Daverley

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (evening)

Claire Daverley was born in 1991 and has been writing stories ever since she was six years old, inspired by art and film and her many trips to the library. After graduating with a degree in Fine Art from The University of Oxford, she began a career in publishing, writing about books by day but penning her own by night, on trains, and in the light of the early mornings. She has spent most of her life in Hertfordshire, but currently lives in Scotland with her husband and spaniel.

Her debut novel, Talking at Night, was snapped up by Penguin Michael Joseph in the UK and Pamela Dorman Books in the US, as well as twenty two languages to date. It was shortlisted for the Book of the Year in the Debut Fiction category at the British Book Awards 2024, was WHSmith Book of the Moment and chosen for Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place Book Club.

Diana Evans

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (evening)

Diana Evans is the award-winning, bestselling author of A House for Alice, Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a. Her prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book awards, and she was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. A book of the year in the New Yorker, Ordinary People received the South Bank Sky Arts Award, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. A House for Alice is the critically acclaimed follow-up.

S J Watson

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (Newcastle)

S.J. Watson is the award-winning author of the international bestsellers Before I Go to Sleep (Doubleday 2011), winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Award for Best Debut Novel and the Galaxy National Book Award for Crime Thriller of the Year, and Second Life (Doubleday 2015). He was born in the Midlands and studied physics at Birmingham University, later working as an audiologist in the NHS, before enrolling on the first Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ course in 2009.

He now lives in Brighton. The film adaption of Before I Go to Sleep, directed by Rowan Joffe, starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth, was released in 2014. S.J. Watson’s latest book, Final Cut, was published to acclaim in 2020.

Follow him at sjwatson.substack.com.

Yara Rodrigues Fowler

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (Newcastle)

Yara Rodrigues Fowler grew up in South London. She is the author of two novels, Stubborn Archivist and there are more things.

Stubborn Archivist was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2019, the Desmond Eliot Prize 2019 and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2019; there are more things received the Society of Authors’ John C Lawrence Award 2018 and was shortlisted for the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award 2020 (both as a work in progress) and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2022 and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022

In 2023, she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Her writing displays a commitment to both politics and craft. With each project, Fowler strains against tradition, testing the boundaries of how fiction might be used as a tool for change.

A.L. Kennedy

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (Newcastle)

A.L. Kennedy was born in Dundee. She has won a variety of UK and international book awards, including a Lannan Award, the Costa Prize, The Heinrich Heine Preis, the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rees Prize. She has twice been included on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. She has written nine novels, six short story collections, three books of non-fiction and three books for children. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Akademie der Kunst. She also writes for the stage, screen, TV and has created an extensive body of radio work including documentaries, monologues, dramas and essays. She also performs occasionally in one person shows and as a stand up comic.