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Royal Literary Fund Fellows

The School of Education, Humanities and Languages at Oxford Brookes 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 Brookes 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 academic assessed and non-assessed work, exam writing, or seminar presentation. RLF Fellows can offer help across the full range of academic disciplines. All Oxford Brookes students who are in the UK at the time of the consultation are entitled to sign up. Tutorial sessions normally last about 50 minutes and they are free to attend. The meetings are usually held in person, but online appointments are possible.

The Fellows’ office is T4.14 (Tonge Building) on the Gipsy Lane site. Students can make appointments by contacting the Fellows directly by email (their addresses are available below).

The RLF is an organisation external to Brookes and students can check their data privacy policy.

Making an appointment

Students can make appointments by contacting the Fellows directly by email.

Fellows' introduction

In this video, Royal Literary Fellows Elizabeth Lewis and Jeremy Treglown talk about their work and how they can help you with your writing.

Elizabeth Lewis

Royal Literary Fund Fellow

Elizabeth is available to meet on Thursdays and Fridays.

Elizabeth Lewis is a dramatist. She has written a dozen radio plays which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her first radio play, The Brief Chronicles of Annie Rose, produced by Alison Hindell and starring Tamsin Greig, drew on Elizabeth’s earlier career as a struggling actress. She was delighted that the years of rejection provided material for her play, which earned multiple Critic’s Choice awards.

Her work ranges from comedy, to magical realism and biodramas of powerful women such as the Magnum photographer Eve Arnold. Her work is largely produced by BBC Wales, drawing on her Welsh heritage of which she is most proud.

Elizabeth has also written extensively for theatre, and her first play, The Glass House, was shortlisted for the International Playwriting Festival run by the Warehouse Theatre Croydon.

For TV, she was privileged to be mentored by Matthew Graham (Life on Mars) to whom she submitted her final draft between contractions with her first child - the ultimate deadline! Another earlier mentor was the playwright Bernard Kops who she worked for in his writing workshops for many years. Elizabeth has also been a journalist and copywriter, which taught her everything she knows about editing, the use of semicolons and making every word count.

She is currently writing a play for Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, inspired by the writer’s juvenilia. It includes a host of irreverent and headstrong characters of whom Elizabeth hopes Jane would approve. Elizabeth lives in a Hampshire village, much like the one Austen favoured, with her family and dog Scout.

Elizabeth Lewis on X

Andy Martin

Andy Martin

Royal Literary Fund Fellow

Andy is available to meet on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10.00am -1.00pm and 3.00pm - 6.00pm

Andy Martin is a writer who has written a lot about other writers, philosophers and surfers. And at least one emperor. His first book, The Knowledge of Ignorance, was published while he was a junior research fellow at King’s College, Cambridge. After studies of Jules Verne and Napoleon, he found gainful employment as a surfing correspondent while carrying out the research (in Hawaii) that would result in his ‘cult classic’, Walking on Water. He went on to dive into the darker side of surfing in Stealing the Wave. His surfing trilogy was completed some years later by Surf, Sweat and Tears, which investigates the mysterious death of his old friend Ted Deerhurst.

Andy has been awarded a Norman Mailer fellowship and a fellowship at the Cullman Center, New York. He has taught modern languages at universities in the UK and the US and given philosophy lessons on Japanese television and at Sing Sing prison, where the existentialist one-liner ‘Hell is other people’ proved popular. The closest he has come to writing a thriller is his double-barrel study of the works of Lee Child, Reacher Said Nothing and With Child. He may be the first writer in history to write a book about a guy writing a book, in real time, in the same room.

His highest accolade is the time a Hollywood producer told him, ‘Andy, this is better than Gatsby’. He is a season ticket holder at West Ham United and has a film script, Dream House, ‘in development’.