Vanessa Gebbie is a Welsh writer living in England. She has won awards for fiction, poetry and travel writing. She is author of several diverse books: a novel, five books of short form fictions, two of poetry, and a book of writing games and ideas for jaded writers. She is commissioning and contributing editor of Short Circuit, Guide to the Art of the Short Story (Salt, 2013), and contributed a chapter to The Rose Metal Press Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (Rose Metal Press, 2013). Her work has been used in GCSE papers, and is on the syllabus in the US. She loves sharing her enthusiasm for writing, and has taught in Italy, Austria, Sweden, Russia, Ireland and the UK. Her work has also been supported by grants and residencies from The Arts Council, Gladstone's Library in Wales, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, Stockholm University, Anam Cara Writers and Artists' Retreat, in Ireland. Her latest residency was at Petersfield Museum and the Edward Thomas Study Centre in Hampshire.
Fiction Bootcamp: Rescue your Writing Mojo
Struggling with your novel? Out of love with your short story collection? Or are you simply feeling distanced from your fiction project? Time to re-engage!
Join Vanessa Gebbie and Cynan Jones for a few days that will sharpen your writing skills, generate new work, and boost your confidence as a writer. You’ll reconnect with key elements of storytelling, share tried and tested games and exercises with a small group of like-minded others and explore both craft and process in workshops and plenaries. You’ll have plenty of your own time to write and to enjoy the unparalleled surroundings of the gorgeous, historic Tŷ Newydd, and you will benefit from two personal one-on-one tutorials, one with each award-winning tutor.
Give yourself the gift of quality time dedicated to your writing. Put the spark back into your words and push your work to the next stage and beyond.
Tutors
Vanessa Gebbie
Cynan Jones
Cynan Jones is an acclaimed fiction writer from the west coast of Wales. His work has appeared in over twenty countries, and in journals and magazines including Granta, Freeman's and The New Yorker. He has also written a screenplay for the hit crime drama Hinterland, a collection of tales for children, and a number of stories for BBC Radio. He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous awards, and won, among other prizes, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award, and the BBC National Short Story Award. www.cynanjones.net
Guest Reader
Max Porter (Digital)
Max Porter’s latest novel is Shy (Faber & Faber, 2023) which was an instant Sunday Times #1 bestseller. He is the author of three other novels and his work has been translated into thirty-one languages. His first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (Faber & Faber, 2016), won the won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. His second novel, Lanny (Faber & Faber, 2019), was a Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller, was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and the 2019 Wainwright Prize, shortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize and shortlisted for both Waterstones and Foyles Book of the Year 2019. His third book, The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber & Faber, 2022), was praised as ‘a miniature masterpiece’, and ‘a feat of empathy, imagination and literary brio’.