Tiffany Murray’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Sunday Times Style, GQ, Independent on Sunday and featured on BBC Radio 4. Her novels, Diamond Star Halo, Happy Accidents and Sugar Hall, have variously been shortlisted for the Wodehouse Bollinger Prize and received the Roger Deakin Award for nature writing. Tiffany has been a Hay Festival Fiction Fellow, a Fulbright scholar, a Senior Lecturer, a record company receptionist, and a dog walker in New York. She currently lives in a forest. My Family and Other Rock Stars is her first memoir.
Writing Yourself In: The personal essay & creative non-fiction
Mon 15 September 2025 - Fri 19 September 2025
Tutors
/ Tiffany Murray & Gary Raymond
Guest Reader
/ Kathryn Tann (Digital)
Course Fee
/
From
£650 - £750 per person
Genre
/ Non-Fiction
Language
/ English
The aim of this course is to explore how writers can use their own story to write engagingly on subjects with wide universal appeal. It will include frank discussion on a medium of writing that is currently very popular in the publishing industry.
This course seeks to introduce emerging writers (and potentially established writers looking to explore non-fiction) to ideas, practices, and debates around the universality of “the personal essay”. The tutors will hold a series of workshops, discussion groups and tutorials looking at the different ways a writer’s personal story can be framed within historical events, cultural patterns, and social phenomenon. These sessions will also explore how the writer can place their own story in the wider subjects of the climate emergency, the cost of living, political division, personal trauma, cultural trends, and writing about facts. At the beginning of the course, participants will be led to identify a subject and a form to work on throughout, so that by the end you will have a working draft of an engaging personal essay. Workshops will include “Finding Your Subject”, “Soundtracking Your Life”, “Experimenting with Form”, “Using the Tools of Fiction in Non-fiction”, and “Connecting with the Reader”.
Tutors
Tiffany Murray
Gary Raymond
Gary Raymond is a novelist, critic, editor and broadcaster. He is the presenter of The Review Show for BBC Radio Wales, and is editor and co-founder of Wales Arts Review. He is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, For Those Who Come After (2015), The Golden Orphans (2018), and Angels of Cairo (2021), as well as a non-fiction book, How Love Actually Ruined Christmas. He has edited a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books, from short story anthologies to political memoir. As a critic he has been seen in the pages of The Guardian and heard on BBC Radio Four’s Front Row and BBC Radio Three’s Sunday Morning programme.
Guest Reader
Kathryn Tann (Digital)
Kathryn Tann is a writer, editor and creative producer originally from south Wales. Her debut essay collection, Seaglass, was published by Calon Books in 2024, and she is the host and producer of This Place – a podcast talking to writers and thinkers in the landscapes that shaped them. She is a founding editor and co-director of Folding Rock Magazine, and has a background in publishing and literature programming. Her own work has featured in The Guardian, The Scotsman, Nation.Cymru and Simple Things, among others, and she speaks regularly at events.