The Writers' Workshop. What We Do.
The Writers' Workshop is the world's leading consultancy for first time writers. We offer professional feedback on your work, run courses, hold events, host a mass of free advice on this site, and we scout for literary agents. We offer:
• Tough, honest editorial advice (more)
• Help with literary agents, where work is strong enough (more)
• Writing and self-editing courses (more)
• The annual Festival of Writing (more)
• We also created Agent Hunter (more)
Our editorial team comprises professional authors, screenwriters and former commissioning editors at major publishing houses.
As the largest firm of our kind, we are probably also the best connected. We run the industry’s leading Festival of Writing. We have superb connections with literary agents & film agents. We also work with some of the world’s leading publishers. If you need a door opened, we can probably open it. Our clients have achieved remarkable success and they have nice things to say about us.
The firm was set up by Harry Bingham, himself a bestselling author of both fiction and non-fiction. Harry's work has been published in the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China, Japan and numerous other territories besides. He has been short-and long-listed for major literary awards. His Getting Published is the standard work on the subject. (Read more.)
The people who run The Writers' Workshop
Laura Wilkins (Manager & Events Director) studied English Literature at BA & MA level. She subsequently worked in the book world for seven years, as a bookseller, publishing assistant and librarian. She has also been an estate agent (but the less said about that the better).
Laura is an obsessive reader and analyser, and now & again dabbles in writing her own stuff.
Nikki (right) has spent most of her career as a senior henchperson / femme fatale to a variety of London-based crime lords. After an unfortunate incident involving an overweight police inspector and a high railway bridge, she has retired to the Cotswolds where she remade her life under a new identity.
She loves reading, has worked in a successful local bookshop and was one of the moving forces behind the Chipping Campden Literary Festival.
Deborah (left) is an international secret services operative, who has notched up a large number of successful renditions, eliminations and abductions for a variety of different agencies. Fluent in eleven or so languages, and with a passionate interest in books and reading, Deborah is now largely retired from the assassination game, limiting her work to a few minor assignments for the Vatican and other semi-state actors.
She now spends most of her time working for the Writers' Workshop and translating scriptures from Sanskrit. The Iraq War was not her fault.
Our Editors
We recruit only the very best editors - ones who have between them published 100s of books, and have won or been shortlisted for numerous awards, including:
• Orange Broadband • Orange New Writer • Whitbread Best Book • Hawthornden • Betty Trask • Crime Writers Ass'n Best First Novel • Sinclair Prize • Guardian Fiction • Authors' Club Best First Novel • Commonwealth Writers 1st Novel • Goss First Novel • Pendleton May Best First Novel • Guardian Children's Fiction • Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize • Dazed & Confused Most Promising Author • Esquire/Waterstones Non-fiction • PEN/JR Ackerley Autobiography • Radio 4 Writer of the Year • RNA New Writers • WHS Thumping Good Read • and many others
We also work with screenplays, and our film & TV team includes screenwriters who have sold work to Miramax, Working Title, Film4, the BBC, ITV, the Film Council, ABC, CBS, Icon, Gorgeous, and many more besides. Between them, our team is responsible for hundreds of hours of screened entertainment.
