From Our Students Posts

Lizzie Mary Cullen is a multi award-winning illustrator, speaker and artist based in London, as well as a member of the AOI (Association of Illustrators). Last year she took part in our inaugural online Writing and Illustrating a Picture Book course, written and presented by Sarah McIntyre and David O’Connell.  We interviewed Lizzie for the AOI website about the challenges […]

Christina Pishiris studied on our Autumn 2012 novel-writing course in London, alongside fellow published alumni Lisa Williamson (author of YA bestseller The Art of Being Normal), James Hall (The Industry of Happiness),  Maria Realf (The One) and Fiona Perrin (The Story After Us). Christina’s debut Love Song For Sceptics – the novel she worked on during the course – is set to be published […]

At Curtis Brown Creative we are committed to championing talented writers and helping them to get the best out of their novels. We are thrilled to be able to find a writers through scholarship programs who we might not otherwise have heard from. Over the past year three of our novel-writing scholarship winners have gone on to get […]

We caught up with Greg Chivers* to talk about his novel The Crying Machine (HarperVoyager) which is coming out on April 4th. He wrote it while participating in our 3-month London-based course with Charlotte Mendelson. Tell us about your novel in a way that looks like it’s imparting valuable knowledge to all the aspiring authors who’ll be reading this. […]

Susan Hurley took our 6-month online novel-writing course back in 2016. Her debut novel (and the novel she worked on during the course) Eight Lives is out now in Australia, published by Affirm Press. We caught up with Susan to find out more about the science behind her biotech thriller and her writing techniques … You […]

Kate Hamer was a student on our second ever novel-writing course in London back in 2011. Now Kate is represented by Curtis Brown’s very own Alice Lutyens. She is the bestselling author of two novels, the Costa-shortlisted The Girl in the Red Coat and The Doll Funeral. Her highly anticipated third novel Crushed will be published in May […]

Lisa Williamson studied with us in London way back in the autumn of 2012, in a group that included other published alumni James Hall, Maria Realf, Fiona Perrin and Christina Pishiris. Her groundbreaking YA debut, The Art of Being Normal, was a huge success, winning the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize for Older Fiction, and getting fantastic notices from the likes of Philip Pullman. […]

Polly Crosby was a student on our 6-week online Write to the End of Your Novel course and joined our 6-month online novel-writing course with Lisa O’Donnell in 2018 after being awarded the Yesterday Scholarship (generously funded by author Felicia Yap). Felicia and the CBC team were instantly enchanted by Polly’s writing when her application came in, and we were delighted to get […]

Former Writing YA and Children’s Fiction course student Jenny Pearson has received a three book deal from Usborne (after an eight way auction!) for her debut middle grade novel – The Super Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates – which will be published in 2020. Here Jenny talks about the importance of finding your writing tribe, perseverance, and what she […]

Michelle Kenney is the author of the Book of Fire Trilogy, a dystopian YA Lit series published by HarperCollins HQDigital. Michelle took our Writing YA and Children’s Fiction course back in 2015 with the inspirational Catherine Johnson. Here she explains her approach to fantasy worldbuilding … I should probably confess at the outset that I’m very […]