Our online tutored courses are designed and delivered by award-winning tutors and industry experts. All are published writers, and many have studied or taught at the University of East Anglia.
Meet the tutors who are here to guide, support and encourage you to produce your best work.
Benjamin Johncock
Benjamin Johncock is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and journalist. His debut novel, The Last Pilot, was published in the U.S. and U.K. to widespread critical acclaim. It won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book of the Year, selected for Brave New Reads, and was one of The Observer’s Hidden Gems of 2016. His award-winning short stories have been published by The Fiction Desk, The Junket, Comma Press and Storgy. His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, The Spectator, and many others, and he has worked as an editor and copywriter. He’s on the editorial board of The Letters Page, a literary journal edited by Jon McGregor at the University of Nottingham, and for two years was a mentor for the National Centre for Writing’s Escalator writing programme. He is also a recipient of two Arts Council England grants. He lives in Norwich with his wife, his daughter, and his son.
Benjamin teaches our beginners’ fiction course.
Yan Ge
Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China in 1984. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English, and is the author of thirteen books in Chinese, including five novels. She has received numerous awards and was named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China. Her work has been translated into eleven languages, including English, French and German. The English translation of her latest novel The Chilli Bean Paste Clan was published in 2018 (Balestier Press). Another translated novel, Strange Beasts of China, was published in 2020/2021 (Tilted Axis Press/Melville House); both won English PEN Translates Awards. Her novella White Horse (HopeRoad, 2019) was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2020. She was on the judging panel of the International Dublin Literary Award 2019.
Yan’s English writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Irish Times, TLS, the Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where she was the recipient of the UEA International Award 2018/19. Her English language debut short story collection Elsewhere was published by Faber in the UK and Scribner in the USA in spring 2023, followed by a novel Hotel Destination. Yan lives in Norwich with her husband and son.
Yan teaches our beginners’ fiction course.
Kathryn Simmonds
Kathryn Simmonds’ first book of poems, Sunday at the Skin Launderette won the 2008 Forward Prize for best first collection and was short-listed for the Costa Poetry Award. She has written short stories and a comedy-drama for Radio 4, and a novel, Love and Fallout, set at the Greenham Common peace camp. The Visitations, a second collection of poems, was published 2013. Her third poetry collection is Scenes from Life on Earth (2022). Kathryn lives in Norwich with her family.
Kathryn teaches our beginners’ poetry course.
Julia Crouch
Julia is the author of six internationally published crime novels: Cuckoo, Every Vow You Break, Tarnished, The Long Fall, Her Husband’s Lover and The New Mother. She also writes (and reads, given the opportunity) slightly chilling, off-beat short stories, which have been published in various collections.
Unable to find a sub-genre of crime writing that neatly described her work, she came up with the term Domestic Noir, which is now widely accepted as the label for one of the most popular crime genres today.
Julia has been a Visiting Fellow on the UEA MA Creative Writing Crime Fiction and teaches online for Faber Academy and the National Centre for Writing. She co-runs the Brighton Crime Wave, a bi-monthly crime fiction night.
Julia teaches our beginners’ crime fiction course.
Ed Parnell
Ed Parnell has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He’s been the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing, and has taught Creative Non-Fiction with us since 2020. His second book, Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country, a work of narrative non-fiction was published in hardback in the UK during October 2019 by William Collins, and subsequently released in the UK and US in paperback in October 2020. The book was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize 2020 for memoir and autobiography.
Ed teaches our beginners’ creative non-fiction course.
Emmanuel Iduma
Emmanuel Iduma is a writer who trained as a lawyer in Nigeria. He is the author of the travelogue A Stranger’s Pose (2018), which was longlisted for 2019 Ondaatje Prize, and I Am Still With You (2023), a memoir on the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war. He has written for Granta, n+1, the New York Review of Books, Aperture, Yale Review, and others. He was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction in 2022. In 2020, Iduma was recognized in Apollo International Art Magazine’s ’40 under 40 Africa’ for the broad social impact of his work.
Iduma has an MFA in Art Writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York City, where he taught for several years. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria and Norwich, UK.
Emmanuel teaches our beginners’ memoir course.
Christabelle Dilks
Christabelle is a writer and script consultant. She trained as an actor at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and worked at the Royal National Theatre, performed Shakespeare in the West End, and after training as a film director, joined Channel 4’s Drama department as Assistant Commissioning Editor. At the BBC she story-lined and script edited series The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, as well as Casualty 1906, the series Casualty 1907,and event pieces Krakatoa: Volcano of Destruction and The Sinking of the Lusitania. Christabelle script edited several episodes of The Bible for History Channel, and worked with independent production company Blast! on Soundproof, Sex and Lies, Animals, and Sex, the City and Me. She has developed original movie scripts with independent film companies Tigerlily, Warp and Inflammable.
Christabelle now works freelance as a screenwriter and script consultant and teaches screenwriting at the University of East Anglia.
Christabelle teaches our beginners’ screenwriting course.
Annie Robertson (Nora Wood)
Annie Robertson is the pen name of Nora Wood, an author of eight romance and book club fiction novels published in ten countries. Nora is also published under the pseudonym, Norie Clarke.
Nora graduated from the Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa with distinction, gaining immediate interest from agents and publishers, with her first novel being published less than a year later. Since then, she has written a book a year, working with both ‘big 5’ and independent publishers. She has experience of writing both original material and to commission, making her a versatile and adaptable commercial novelist.
Prior to her career in writing, Nora trained as a composer at the Royal Academy of Music in London, then worked as an assistant for an Oscar winner, an acclaimed artist, a PR mogul and a Beatle. After several years of running errands for the rich and famous, she went to medical school where, hiding novels in anatomy textbooks, she discovered her true passion for writing.
Nora now lives in a beautiful village by the sea with her husband, son and dogs. When not writing, she can be found in her studio at the bottom of her garden playing the piano and trying, not very well, to draw.
Nora teaches our beginners’ romantic fiction course.
Megan Bradbury
Megan Bradbury is a British writer, tutor, and mentor, and author of the critically acclaimed novel, Everyone is Watching (Picador, 2016). Described as a ‘beating heart of a novel’ by Ali Smith and ‘kaleidoscopic’ by Eimear McBride, the novel was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and was listed as one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2016. Bradbury is a graduate of the Creative Writing Prose Masters programme at the University of East Anglia, and has been awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship, an Author’s Foundation award, and numerous grants from Arts Council England. She has written for the Irish Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She is also an experienced artistic collaborator and a previous recipient of the Escalator Literature Prize. www.meganbradbury.com
Megan teaches our intermediate fiction course.
Helen Ivory
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears, and teaches for NCW Academy online. She has published five collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Double Life of Clocks (2002), The Dog in the Sky (2006), The Breakfast Machine (2010), Waiting for Bluebeard (2013) and The Anatomical Venus (2019), with a sixth, Constructing a Witch, out in 2024. Fool’s World, a collaborative Tarot with artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A book of collage/mixed media poems, Hear What the Moon Told Me, was published KFS in 2017, a chapbook, Maps of the Abandoned City, by SurVision in 2019, and Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems was published by MadHat in the US in 2023. The Anatomical Venus was shortlisted for the poetry category of the East Anglian Book Awards 2019.
Helen teaches our intermediate poetry course.
Jenn Ashworth
Jenn Ashworth was born in Preston and studied at Cambridge and Manchester. Her novels include A Kind of Intimacy, The Friday Gospels and Fell. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. In 2019 she published Notes Made While Falling, a memoir told in a series of essays. Her latest novel is Ghosted: A Love Story. She is a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University.
Jenn teaches our intermediate memoir course.
