Meet Writing a Novel’s Guest Tutors for January 2026
6 minutes read
We’re delighted to introduce some of our guest tutors for the January 2026 iterations of our Writing a Novel courses.
Rose Tomaszewska
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (online)
Rose Tomaszewska graduated from UEA and worked for thirteen years in publishing, as Editorial Director at Chatto & Windus (Vintage, Penguin Random House), Virago (Little, Brown) and riverrun (Quercus). Authors she’s published have won or been shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award, the Orwell Prize, the Women’s Prize, the Bailie Gifford Prize. She has taught at Arvon, various universities and literary festivals and in women’s prison, as well as running the Faber Edit & Submit Course since 2020. Currently she is a freelance editor and reviews new fiction for a literary scout. Her teaching style is hands-on, imaginative and interactive, valuing exercises over lecturing and encouraging students to collaborate and develop new skills, with a lot of positivity and laughter along the way.
Jenny Savill
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (online)
Jenny Savill is a primary agent and Director at Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Jenny joined Andrew Nurnberg Associates in 2002. She represents authors writing for both children and adults. Her roster of adult authors includes internationally bestselling novelist Natasha Pulley, Shirley-Jackson winner Catriona Ward, writer of the darkly comic Sweetpea series C J Skuse, and graphic novelist Fred Fordham. On the children’s side, her authors include Matt Brown, Keren David and Bath Novel award shortlistee Hana Tooke.
Nilesha Chauvet
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (online)
Nilesha Chauvet is a British Indian novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, The Revenge of Rita Marsh, was published in hardback by Faber as a crime thriller superlead title in 2024. Her Two Lives was published in paperback 27 March 2025. Nilesha writes zeitgeist psychological suspense, crime, and thriller. She is also the Managing Director of GOOD which advises commercial brands on Purpose, and helps charities raise millions of pounds for good causes. A graduate of Faber Academy, Nilesha has also studied novels and short story writing at Curtis Brown Creative and City Lit. She read Philosophy & Theology at Oxford and was ordained an Interfaith Minister.
Phoebe Morgan
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (online)
Phoebe Morgan is the Executive Publisher at Simon & Schuster UK, running the Adult Fiction list. She is also a bestselling author of five thrillers, published by HarperCollins. She was shortlisted for Editor of the Year in 2022, and runs a Substack called The Honest Editor, aimed at improving transparency within the publishing industry. She is passionate about finding new voices and building brands.
Eimear McBride
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (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.
Irenosen Okojie
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (evening)
Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British author whose work pushes the boundaries of form, language and ideas. Her novel, Butterfly Fish, and short story collections, Speak Gigantular and Nudibranch, have won and been nominated for multiple awards. She won the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for her short story ‘Grace Jones’. Her journalism has been featured in The New York Times, The Observer, The Guardian and The Huffington Post. She is a Contributing Editor at And Other Stories. She co-presented the BBC’s Novels That Shaped Our World podcast Turn Up for The Books alongside Simon Savidge and Bastille frontman, Dan Smith. Her work has been optioned for the screen. She has also judged various literary prizes including the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award and the Dublin Literary Award. She was a judge for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Formerly the Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was named a visionary artist in Red Magazine‘s The Next 25 visionaries to watch and awarded an MBE For Services to Literature in 2021. She is the director and founder of Black to the Future festival. Her new novel Curandera is published by Dialogue Books.
Keith Ridgway
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime)
Keith Ridgway is from Dublin. He is the author of A Shock which was the winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2021, and shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize. He is also the author of the novels Hawthorn & Child, Animals, The Parts, and The Long Falling, as well as short stories and novellas. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Stinging Fly, and others. A new novel, Dooneen, will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions in 2026. He has been awarded the O. Henry Prize, the Prix Femina Étranger in France, and The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He lives in south London.
Diana Evans
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime)
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.
Nicola Dinan
Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime)
Nicola Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur and now lives in London. Bellies, her debut, was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, shortlisted for the Mo Siewcharran Prize, and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her second novel, Disappoint Me, will be released in 2025.
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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