True North

We are all professional writers who work across a range of genres. We are academics, novelists, playwrights, radio dramatists, poets, non-fiction authors and journalists. As writer-facilitators, we help academics map fruitful ways of getting to grips with long-form composition: planning chapters, defining narrative arcs, and learning how they can make their ideas travel, while being flexible enough to let inspiration strike.

Who We Are

Marina Benjamin

Marina Benjamin is a writer of personal essays, family memoir, creative non-fiction and, most recently, a trilogy of books exploring midlife experience in real time. The Middlepause (2016) and Insomnia (2018) were widely acclaimed at home and abroad, and have been translated into nine languages. A Little Give (2023), completes the series. Her essays have appeared in Granta, Aeon, the TLS and the Paris Review. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and is a memoir and non-fiction writing tutor for the Arvon Foundation and the Granta Writers’ Workshop.

Dr Tina Pepler

Tina Pepler is a dramatist who works in radio and television. Much of her work is factually based and draws on skills learned when she was working on her PhD in Drama at Bristol University. She has written extensively for BBC Radio 4, Radio 3 and the World Service. Her television work has been broadcast on BBC1, Channel 4 and ITV, and ranges from historical drama to contemporary single dramas, episodes of A Most Mysterious Murder co-written with Julian Fellowes, and an episode of Downton Abbey. Tina has been a tutor with The Arvon Foundation, has taught new writers in South Africa and is a core tutor on the MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford University and a Consultant Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.

Dr Anna Barker

Dr Anna Barker (writing as Anna Ralph) is a novelist, poet and journalist. Her first novel, The Floating Island (Random House, 2008), won the Society of Author’s Betty Trask Award for best debut from a writer under 35. Before I Knew Him (Random House, 2009) was shortlisted for a Good Housekeeping Good Read award. As a journalist she won a Tom Cordner award and she has written for The Guardian, the Western Mail and The Journal. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Huddersfield. During her Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellowship at the University of Teesside, she developed an academic writing app for students called Alex and later spent several years as an RLF Consultant Fellow.

Dr Heather Dyer

Heather Dyer is a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow, an award-winning children's author and a consultant in creative thinking techniques. Heather's undergraduate degree was in biology, and her doctorate explores the psychology of creativity. She’s particularly interested in helping writers explore more creative and efficient ways of working: how to engineer the space for insight, face the blank page fearlessly, build a project from the ground up and stay motivated and inspired over the long term.

James McConnachie

James McConnachie is a writer of non-fiction. His publications include travel guidebooks and reference books, and he was shortlisted for Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year for The Book of Love, a book-history of the Kamasutra. He is currently working on a biography of a Himalayan mountain, to be published by Bloomsbury. He has reviewed non-fiction regularly for the Sunday Times since 2008, and also reviews for the New Scientist and Times Literary Supplement. He is active in copyright and industry issues as a non-executive director of the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, and is editor of The Author, the quarterly journal of the Society of Authors.