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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.

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.

Making an appointment

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

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

Jeremy Treglown

Royal Literary Fund Fellow

Jeremy is available to meet on Tuesdays.

As a writer, critic, editor, teacher, literary trustee and prize-judge Jeremy Treglown has spent much of his career trying to promulgate clear, jargon-free writing. His time has been divided roughly equally between the professional literary world and that of university teaching.

His books include the first biography of Roald Dahl (1994), an edition of the letters of the Restoration poet Rochester, and lives of the novelist Henry Green, the short-story writer and critic V. S. Pritchett and the American journalist John Hersey. He also wrote an acclaimed cultural history of mid-twentieth-century Spain, Franco’s Crypt (2013). Work by him has been published in the New Yorker, Granta and many other magazines, and translated into Albanian, German, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish.

After teaching at Oxford and UCL he joined the staff of the Times Literary Supplement, first as arts editor, then for nine years as Editor. Subsequently, after a period at Princeton, he was a professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick, where, with the poet David Morley, he began the university’s celebrated writing programme. Most recently he has been Chair of the Trustees of the Arvon Foundation, which has run writing courses since the late 1960s. He is currently researching Arvon’s history.

Professor Treglown has chaired the judges of the Booker prize and other literary awards, been a member of Council of the Royal Society of Literature and held fellowships at All Souls, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.