One small step: the true value of mentoring for writers

Today, Kate Worsley is the award-winning writer of two novels, She Rises and Foxash. But her journey as a fiction writer began more than a decade ago, when she was selected for Escalator.

In this piece, she reflects on the profound impact of the Escalator Fellowships, exploring their vital role in building writers’ confidence and helping them find their place within the literary landscape.

In the town where I grew up, there were two indoor shopping centres. Though only one, I remember, boasted two levels. And an escalator. To those trudging in wet and windswept, with bags and baby buggies, with sore feet and long lists and big dreams, it offered a solid steel escape from the everyday, a siren stairway to a sort of heaven. For tucked away on the upper floor were the non-essential shops, fashion and music and all sorts of indulgence. One small step… and you could take a moment. Set down your bags, take in the expanding vistas, scan for talent, close your eyes, open your mind.

In the town where I grew up, I quickly understood reading fiction to be an antisocial, pretentious, non-essential habit. And, therefore, that writing the stuff would be beyond the pale, inviting ridicule, incomprehension and humiliation in equal measure; an activity as outlandish as wearing velvet in the rain, as attention seeking as running up the down escalator.

By the time I came to NCW’s Escalator programme as a mentee, I had two degrees and a career in journalism behind me, but was still tripped up and burdened by that internalised resistance to doing what I love best.

All I had to do was step on. My mentor Tobias Hill sat down with me in the quiet back room of a huge beautiful pub and proceeded to take me and my writing seriously. He read, and listened, as a writer. I was up there, on the same level, often enough and long enough, to start to feel at home.

I was up there, on the same level, often enough and long enough, to start to feel at home.

And in my fellow East Anglian mentees, I met others who dared call themselves writers. It was like coming out all over again. My novels have been rooted in the region, and to be joined on Escalator by a growing cohort of local writers has been both a comfort and an inspiration.

Escalator is not a fast track to literary success. It’s no great glass elevator. And mentoring is not teaching, or even editing. It’s sharing space, experience, energy and attention. Building a relationship over time that helps a writer both to take their writing seriously, and get it out into the world to be read.

My first novel found a publisher just as I joined Escalator, while the novel I was mulling over with Tobias took much, much longer. A writing career is no travelator. Life gets in the way, throws you off. But having a mentor keeps you on track and moving. So now, as an Escalator mentor myself, I treasure all those setbacks and detours because I can share all the ways I have found to keep writing, and keep aiming higher each time.

These days, my mentoring is the escalator, really. It enables me to take a writer by the hand and invite them to step up. Whoever they are, wherever they come from, it can hone their writing, grow their confidence, connect them with the writing world, and, above all, keep them writing.

Escalator New Writing Fellows 2025–26

This piece was commissioned to accompany the booklet that presents the Escalator 2025–26 Fellows and highlights the writing projects they have been developing throughout their fellowships.

We invite publishers, programmers, editors, agents, and readers to discover the ten outstanding early-career fiction writers from across the East of England. The booklet offers more than an introduction to the Fellows; it is an invitation to new perspectives, new conversations and new possibilities for contemporary fiction.

The Escalator New Writing Fellowships are kindly supported by

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