IsleWrite is a writing group based in Thanet, but with active members from all over Kent.
We started out twenty years or so ago as a bunch of writers getting together once or twice a month with the aim of improving their work and learning together to become better writers.
All sorts of people belong, they don't come to every meeting, but everyone who does is always made welcome. Among our members we boast published authors, members with degrees in creative writing, fiction and non-fiction writers, experienced and beginner writers. We even have a couple of musicians, film makers, script writers - a wealth of experience and expertise to help guide our members sometimes wobbly paths to becoming better writers.
Everyone has a voice, and everyone is allowed to express it. Our aim is to provide a comfortable and supportive space for free expression. When we critique another writer's work it's always in a positive way and over many years our members have increased in skill.
for the writer within
Members
Jill Anabona Smith
Patricia Mahoney
Laure Meloy
Denise Gow
Jill is a prize-winning author of long and short fiction, with successes at BBC Radio Nottingham, story-tellers.co.uk, the Winchester Annual Writers' Conference, Kent Life and Writing Magazine. Her novel, Four Kinds of Shipwreck has been published as a Pen to Print Book challenge finalist.
For twenty years she has been coordinator and moderater for IsleWrite before retiring.
FOUR KINDS OF SHIPWRECK
With a successful career in the City and a great love life, Ava had everything. Then she got married. What happened? Her husband knows... and he won't say.
Order your copy HERE
Laure is an award-winning opera singer, having sung with companies around the world, including Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, Hungarian State Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
As a writer she collaborated on the script of an opera/cabaret called One Art (which she also performed), and publishes a blog about life in the arts. She recently compiled a book on her family history.
She has just released a career memoir From Aida to Zaide: scribblings of a mad soprano.
Patricia was born in Ottowa, Canada and moved to London, England to pursue a career in the performing arts. She has worked in both countries as a senior arts manager, artistic director, actor, director and playwright. Five of her plays have been professionally produced in her native Canada.
Patricia is also an award-winning writer of short stories, poetry and flash fiction - many of which have been published in the UK and Canada
FULL OF GRACE
Full of Grace is the title story from Patricia's collection of short stories set in the 1950s and 60s about a young Canadian girl Mary Margaret and her journey from inquisitive child to young woman - with a stopover in gawky adolescence. The book comes with an accompanying CD of Patrica reading these reflective stories. You can listen to a couple at www.patriciamahoney.com
FROM AIDE TO ZAIDE : scribblings of a mad soprano
Funny things do happy on the way to the opera house... In this book Laure Meloy shares with us the personal stories that audiences rarely get to hear. From A to Z, we find out what happens on the other side of the stage door
Denise loves writing for pleasure, sometimes for pay and occasionally for awards. She's tempted by shorts, novels, plays, TV and screenplays.
She served her apprenticeship at the Creative Business going on to write episodes of Emmerdale. Her screenplays have been commissioned and optioned. Denise has also directed many commercials for household products from Fairy Liquid to Baby Bio and the multi award-winning Equilon, a product for irritable bowel syndrome while managing to avoid the condition herself.
The Hue of Yellow won the Folkestone Literary Festival short story competition. It was adapted from a passage in her novel The Lost Madonna.
The Lost Madonna can be found on Kindle or at www.denisegow.co.uk along with details of other novels and her recent play The Music of Mathematics about the life and work of Ada Lovelace and her friendship with Charles Dickens
WILD WATERCRESS is Denise's passionate, hypnotic novel about a teenager's missing mother and lesbian love set in Portobello, in a very black and white London in the early sixties.
Lisa meets a confident older woman who she falls for. But is she just a mother substitute?
Lisa picks up the rhythm of the ska beat and becomes a colourful hippie running a music cafe - Wild Watercress - in the Height, San Francisco during the Summer of Lovin' 1960
Confident in her new life, she writes to her love left in London and asks her to join her...
Richard Savin
Richard is a retired journalist who now devotes his time to writing. In the early part of his career he worked exclusively in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
After ten years in Asia he returned to the UK, indulging a lifelong passion for cooking he opened his first restaurant, going on to open and operate two further restaurants in London and a popular City bar.
Tessa has worked as a teacher, teacher educator, editor, publisher and author of non-fiction. She is now enjoying the playful world of fiction writing. For more information on all the different kinds of writing she does, please visit:
Tessa's first full length fiction book, a collection of episodes of village life as seen by some townies, is out now. It's available on Amazon in kindle and in paperback at:
Tessa Woodward
Ali Boots is a lyricist, writer and musician, and has played bass in bands half way across Europe and back.
She has a BA(Hons) in Creative Writing and when not flying a dragon and annihilating monsters in World of Warcraft enjoys tai chi and coffee with her mates.
She is an active member of IsleWrite and in 2022 was lucky enough to be a winner in the Birchington Literary Festival fiction competition with her story The Joy of Giving.
She is currently seeking publication of her first novel Salamander - love and lust on the road and what happens when a band member's murky past reaches out to threaten the love that binds them together.
Ali Boots
in 2010 he returned to journalism as editor for a national magazine and was a regular guest with BBC's Radio South until 2005. His first book Vakilabad - Iran was published in 1980. Since then he has completed 11 novels, 3 memoirs, a children's storybook and several short stories.
Friday 29th September sees the launch of latest novel, The Man at the Walpole Bay Hotel, at the Walpole Bay Hotel in Margate.
Order Richard's books HERE
I'm currently working on short stories and flash fiction, having spent my time penning songs and writing screenplays for short movies, which have been screened in some reputable cinemas.
All of my work contains a strong, humorous element, but not always 'funny ha-ha', if you get what I mean.
Chris Plato
