ex TSFG member Julia Bell is Professor of New Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and one of the UK’s leading creative writing teachers. A novelist, essayist, and poet, she has guided hundreds of writers from first draft to publication over more than twenty-five years. Her new book, Between the Lines (Simon & Schuster, 2026) is a live-action exploration of the psychological, political, and philosophical lessons of the workshop. 

An expert insight into the transformative power of storytelling, together with practical advice on how to make your writing come alive.

The way we use language to tell stories reveals a lot about who we are and what matters to us. In Between the Lines, Julia Bell draws on almost thirty years of teaching to take us inside the writing workshop, where students from all over the world meet to share and discuss their work. She finds that in this space a kind of alchemy occurs, where paying real attention to one another and what we have to say – the ultimate challenge in our atomised, ‘always on’ society – becomes a profound emotional education.