Meet Writing a Novel’s Guest Tutors for Autumn 2025

Sarah Harman

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime)

Sarah Harman is a recovering journalist living in London. As a broadcaster, she has over a decade of experience reporting on major breaking news stories around the globe, most recently as a foreign correspondent for NBC News, reporting for Today, Nightly News, and MSNBC. Her debut novel, All the Other Mothers Hate Me, won the Lucy Cavendish Prize for Fiction in 2023 and she is a graduate of Faber Academy’s flagship Writing a Novel course.

Photo: © Faye Thomas

Sophie Mackintosh

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (daytime)

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.

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.

Alice McIlroy

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (evening)

Alice McIlroy was born in London. She is a fiction writer and a graduate of Faber Academy’s novel-writing programme. She has a degree in English and a Graduate Diploma in Law, and has taught English in both London and Milan.

Her debut novel, The Glass Woman, was longlisted for the Stylist Prize for Feminist Fiction 2021 and is due to be published in 2024. It is about our relationship with Artificial Intelligence and an exploration of memory, identity, love and loss. She is working on her second novel, The Hiding Place, a climate fiction thriller, which has already been longlisted for the Grindstone International Novel Prize 2021. Ali lives in North London with her partner.

Chris Power

Guest tutor for Writing a Novel (evening)

Chris Power is the author of a novel, A Lonely Man, a Washington Post and New Statesman book of the year, and a short story collection, Mothers, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize.

His fiction has appeared in Granta, the Stinging Fly and the Dublin Review. He was a regular presenter of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Open Book’ from 2020 to 2024. His criticism has appeared in newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the New Statesman, Fantastic Man and the London Review of Books.

Chris regularly chairs literary events and has taught writing in various capacities, including on the MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. His judging experience includes the Frank O’Connor Prize, the BBC National Short Story Award, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. Chris is a judge for the Booker Prize 2025.

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.