Writing Lives Workshop With Kathy Page And Vicky Grut

A weekend workshop for anyone seeking a fresh approach to writing from real experience – your own or other people’s. Using a mix of writing exercises, feedback and focused discussion, we will experiment with story-telling techniques, pace, theme and characterization, as well as exploring different ways of structuring material. We’ll also help you decide whether the story you want to tell would work best as fiction or non-fiction. Sunday morning will be set aside for a writing exercise inspired by a specific location. We reconvene in the afternoon to hear the resulting pieces of writing, give feedback and share final thoughts.

‘Your courses give me time, space and permission to experiment with my writing in a very open and accepting environment. [...] There is just enough structure, just enough balance of prompts and sharing - time to think about the craft of writing. Thank you.’

‘I feel I have more confidence that I will actually finish my project now!’

‘Balance between instruction and exercises was good. It really did focus and energize me. Well run. Vicky was very good at focusing on us and not her own approach/work etc.’


Vicky Grut’s stories have been published in many short story collections including Reshape Whilst Damp (Serpent’s Tail, 2000); Valentine’s Day: Stories of Revenge (Duckworth, 2000), two volumes of the British Council anthology New Writing 13 (Picador, 2005) and NW14 (Granta, 2006), and Waving at the Gardener (Bloomsbury, 2009). She was a finalist in the 2009 Asham Award and won the 2006 Chapter One International Short Story Prize.

Kathy Page is the author of seven novels, including The Story of My Face, long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and currently in development as a feature film; Alphabet, a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award in 2005; and The Find, published in Canada in 2010 and shortlisted for the ReLit Award. She is co-editor of a collection of essays published in 2012 In the Flesh: Twenty writers explore the body, and her recent work increasingly explores the boundaries between memoir and fiction. Kathy lives in Canada but is in London this summer to research settings and characters for her next book