Upcoming Events

4th February – Kate Rhodes

We are delighted to welcome crime and mystery novelist Kate Rhodes to our first event of 2025. Kate completed an English Degree and PhD on Tennessee Williams while living in the USA. She now lives and writes poetry and novels in Cambridge. Her latest books are the Isles of Scilly Mysteries, featuring

Our monthly writers’ events are held at: Hartington Grove Meeting House.

91-93 Hartington Grove
Cambridge
CB1 7UB

Non-members are welcome to attend most events, at a charge of £3. Please contact our chairman Harry Goode if you would like to come along.

If you have any suggestions for speakers you would like to hear at our writers’ events, please contact our programme secretary, Karin Milner.

Recent Events

Routes to Publishing – 1st February 2022 (Online)

Online Workshop: Siobhan Carew will be hosting this workshop over Zoom on the various routes to publishing. Routes to Publishing There are two main routes to publishing: through a traditional agent/publisher, or by self-publishing. Within those choices, there are sub-choices. Few traditional publishers take on work directly. They usually prefer agents to act as intermediaries, filtering the wheat from the

1st March 2022 – Short Story Competition Results Evening (Online)

Our March meeting will take place online via Zoom, and will comprise the results of the Cambridge Writers 2022 short story competition. Our competition this year was judged by Andrew Cowan, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Since his first prize-winning novel Pig (1994), he’s written four more novels depicting people in provincial worlds. The theme

7th December 2021 – Giles Yeo

Giles Yeo is a geneticist with over 20 years’ experience dedicated to researching obesity and the brain control of food intake. His current research focuses on understanding how these pathways differ from person to person, and the influence of genetics in our relationship with food and eating habits. Giles will present his book, Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and

2nd November 2021 – Sophie Hannah

Sophie Hannah is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling writer of crime fiction, published in forty-nine languages and fifty-one territories. Her books have sold millions of copies worldwide. In 2014, with the blessing of Agatha Christie’s family and estate, Sophie published a new Poirot novel, The Monogram Murders, which was a bestseller in more than fifteen countries. She has since

5th October 2021 – Rosie Sykes

Rosie Sykes is a food writer and chef, living in London and Cambridge who was, at one time, Head Chef at Fitzbillies. She has cooked in the kitchens of some of Britain’s most celebrated chefs, including Joyce Molyneux, Shaun Hill and Alastair Little. Her critically acclaimed gastropub, The Sutton Arms in Smithfields, London, established her as one of the most

23rd September 2021 – Annual General Meeting, members only

6th September 2021 – Professor Andrew Cowan

Andrew Cowan studied at the University of East Anglia, where he is now Director of Creative Writing and teaches on the Creative Writing MA. Since his acclaimed and prize winning first novel, Pig (1994), he wrote another four novels which depict people in provincial worlds; there is an interest in the domestic, in the mechanics of relationships when the blood-rush

10th July 2021 – Summer Social

1st June 2021 – Flash Fiction Competition

Competitors bring a printed copy of their anonymous entry to the meeting, word limit 250

4th May 2021 – Workshop

How do I blindside my reader without completely cheating them? How do I lay a trail of clues without my plot becoming predictable? This workshop is designed to help you answer those questions and more. We will be covering the five different types of foreshadowing, including Chekhov’s gun, prophecy, flashback, symbolic foreshadowing, and red herring, discussing examples in literature and

25th February 2021 – Short Story Competition Judging Event

*** Note that the date for this meeting has changed *** Our competition Rosemary Hayes is an author and creative writing tutor. She came to writing from a background in advertising, marketing and publishing. Working intermittently for Cambridge University Press from 1986-2001, one of her jobs was to run a national children’s writing competition, The Cambridge Young Writers’ Award, which

1st September 2020 – Andy McDonnell

Andrew McDonnell is the course leader for the English Literature and Creative Writing degrees at University Centre Peterborough where he undertakes research in Literary Theory, English Literature and Creative Writing. His debut poetry collection, The Somnambulist Cookbook was published by Salt in June 2019. It is a series of poems that examine the quality of disappearance, how memory interferes with