Our tutors

Elizabeth Speller has written ever since she first lifted a pencil and believes there are no absolute boundaries between types of creative writing. She has crossed them all, having written non-fiction, fiction, memoir and poetry.

She has lived in Italy, Germany and Greece. She had children young and arrived as a mature student at the University of Cambridge. She read Classics, stayed on to do her MPhil and returned as a Visiting Scholar.

Her non-fiction includes a biography of Emperor Hadrian; a memoir: Sunlight on the Garden (Granta) and Granta Companion Guides to Athens and to Rome (unhindered by her inability to tell left from right, helped by her love of the unbeaten track).

Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and won prizes in the Bridport and various other competitions. Her articles have been published in the Times, Financial Times, TLS, The Observer, Sunday Telegraph, The Independent, The Big Issue and Vogue.

Her novels have been published in eight countries. The first, The Return of Captain John Emmett (Granta), was a Richard and Judy pick and an Orange Prize (now Women’s Prize for Fiction) Book of the Month. Her most recent, At Break of Day (Virago) was Central New York State Book of the Year.

Her lyrics for Michael Berkeley’s musical elegy Farewell, commissioned by Sir Paul McCartney as a requiem for his wife Linda, combined her words with those of two other writers: the authorship appears as Milton, Shakespeare and Speller. This makes her smile.

Elizabeth has taught at the universities of Bristol and Birmingham, held a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Warwick and is a tutor and course director in Creative Writing at the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge.

John Naish’s journalistic career spans more than 30 years and counting. He has written for all the major UK national newspapers, as well as a wide range of leading periodicals – from New Statesman to Esquire, and from Saga to Classic Bike, as well as presenting for BBC radio and television.

His freelance specialism is medicine and science, though as a national newspaper feature-writer he has also covered everything from guerrilla warfare to the sexual habits of shrimps. At present he writes primarily for The Times and Daily Mail.

While working for 15 years as an in-house journalist on The Times, he was variously health editor, property editor, motoring editor, celebrity interviewer and production editor.

He is author of three non-fiction books, including Enough: Breaking free from the world of excess (Hodder & Stoughton), an award-winning bestseller that sold in 13 languages.

He is an experienced lecturer and public speaker, and has taught investigative journalism and non-fiction writing on courses run by Westminster University, the University of Cambridge and Regent’s University London.

John is legally authorised to marry people of all spiritual and sexual persuasions. He also buries them. As an habitual fixer of old and broken things, John has restored ancient houses, including our retreat centre, The Hall, and runs and repairs vintage motorcycles, cars and lawnmowers.

He likes a show-off stunt; the only video he has ever made for YouTube got more than 2.5 million views. To help sell his book Enough, he launched the annual Landfill Prize for the world’s most wastefully pointless product, which reaped global headlines on a regular basis.

He holds a BA Hons; Philosophy/English, Leicester University, and a postgrad in Periodical Journalism, London College of Printing. Before that, he worked as a bookie’s boy, motor mechanic, factory machinist and insurance claims assessor, all of which were far more fun than his brief stint as an advertising copywriter.

Louise Foxcroft made a rackety start as a 1970s art student before dropping out, hitching around America and Canada, then having two baby boys by the age of 23. Eventually realising the need to curb her impetuosity, develop her decision-making and build a functioning filter, she began to get organised.

A year’s long-distance learning with the Open University saw her into a history degree at the University of Cambridge, followed by an MPhil and PhD. Her thesis, The Making of Addiction: The use and abuse of opium in nineteenth-century Britain, was published with Ashgate in 2007.

Her second book, Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A history of the modern menopause (Granta, 2009), won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year award.

Her third, Calories and Corsets: A history of dieting over 2,000 years (Profile Books, 2012), was shortlisted for a Food Writer’s Guild prize. Sexuality: All That Matters (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) came next, then The Serpentine, Or, The Attractions of Water (Honeybee Books, 2015), and Gayer-Anderson: The Life and Afterlife of the Irish Pasha (American University in Cairo Press, 2016).

Louise writes only on subjects that stir her soul. She believes passionately that history frames our existence, and that we can bring it to life through non-fiction books that are shamelessly opinionated.

She has written for The Times, Independent, Observer, Guardian, New Scientist, Daily Mail, London Review of Books and New Humanist, contributed to TV and radio, and was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, 2015-17.

She currently teaches creative non-fiction at the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, and covertly writes fiction.