Elizabeth O'Connor lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specialising in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes. Her debut novel, Whale Fall, was published in 2024 by Picador in the UK and Pantheon in the US and will be published in eleven other territories. It was chosen as one of The Observer's ten best debut novels of the year, and a book of the year in The New Yorker and The New York Times, among others. It also won the 2025 Chautauqua Prize for fiction.
Writing Tension
Mon 13 July 2026 - Fri 17 July 2026
Tutors
/ Elizabeth O'Connor & Yael van der Wouden
Guest Reader
/ Carys Davies (Digital)
Course Fee
/
From
£ per person
Genre
/ Fiction
Language
/ English
What makes a story impossible to put down? Tension. That delicious sense of anticipation, unease, or longing that keeps us turning pages, holding our breath, or keeps us reading at 2.00 am even though we have somewhere to be in the morning. It can be high stakes, low stakes, mysterious or explicit, but tension propels narrative, deepens character relationships, and creates a charged connection between writer and reader.
In this week-long course, we’ll explore how tension works across structure, character, dialogue, and language, drawing from prose, poetry, and plays to uncover the techniques that make stories compelling. Whether you’re writing a slow-burn romance, a psychological drama, or literary fiction full of secrets and silences, tension is your most powerful tool. We’ll read short, sharp excerpts from other writers, and use them as springboards for our own writing. You’ll take part in generative exercises, group discussions, and feedback sessions designed to sharpen your instincts and stretch your skills. This course is open to writers of all levels and genres.
Tutors
Elizabeth O'Connor
Yael van der Wouden
Yael van der Wouden was born in 1987 and lives and works in The Netherlands. The Safekeep (Viking, 2024), her debut novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 and won the Women's Prize 2025. It was also longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Wingate Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. She lectures in creative writing and comparative literature.
Guest Reader
Carys Davies (Digital)
Carys Davies is the author of three novels and two collections of short stories. Her debut novel West (Granta, 2019) was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, runner-up for the Society of Authors' McKitterick Prize, and winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction. Her second novel The Mission House (Granta, 2021) was The Sunday Times 2020 Novel of the Year. Her latest novel Clear (Granta, 2024), won the 2025 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the 2025 Wales Book of the Year and was nominated for multiple other awards including the Walter Scott Prize, Scotland’s National Book Award, the Prix Femina, the Prix Médicis, and the Europese Literatuurprijs. Her short story collection The Redemption of Galen Pike (Salt, 2024) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is also the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award and a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a 2025/26 Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.