Royal Literary Fund

Royal Literary Fund Fellows

The Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brooks University hosts Writing Fellows from the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) in London. The RLF is a charity which supports professional writers through a variety of schemes, and Oxford Brooks University was one of the pioneer hosts for the RLF Fellowship scheme.

The RLF scheme places experienced writers into higher education institutions to offer confidential one-to-one tutorials to undergraduate and postgraduate students on any aspect of writing and presentation, whether creative writing, academic assessed and non-assessed work, exam writing or seminar presentation. All Oxford Brookes students are entitled to sign up and consult with one of the Fellows, who are available across four days each week.

The Fellows’ office is T4.04, Tonge Building, on Gipsy Lane Campus. Students can make appointments by signing a sheet on the office door.

Enquiries about the RLF scheme should be addressed to Simon Kovesi, the coordinator at Brookes.

Deborah Bosley

Born in South London in 1965, Deborah was rescued from waitressing in 1987 by those nice men at Rough Guides who commissioned her to write The Rough Guide to California. She stayed with Rough Guides for ten years updating the California book and also writing the city guide, The Rough Guide to San Francisco.

Other work included a lost year in the West End nightclub, Legends, as well as a few years snarling at people from the front desk of the Groucho Club.

A move to the country enabled her to knuckle down and write for the Literary Review from 1993-2000 and publish the novels, Let Me Count The Ways (1996) shortlisted for the Betty Trask Award, The Common Touch (1998) and A Kind of Warfare (2000).

Hugh Thomson

Hugh is a writer who has explored the wilder corners of the planet, from the edges of Peru to the Himalayas, looking for Inca ruins and lost cultures.

His books for Weidenfeld & Nicolson include: The White Rock; Nanda Devi; and Cochineal Red: Travels through Ancient Peru. In 2009, he wrote Tequila Oil, a memoir about getting lost in Mexico when he was eighteen and, in the words of the Alice Cooper song, ‘didn’t know what he wanted’. It was serialised by BBC R4 as ‘Book of the Week’.

In 2012 Random House published The Green Road into the Trees: An Exploration of England in which Hugh for the first time wrote about his own country, an account of a journey along prehistoric trackways.