Robert McCrum (Chair) is Associate Editor of the Observer and was Literary Editor there from 1996-2008. He was formerly editor-in-chief at Faber and Faber from 1979-1996 and has written six novels, a memoir, My Year Off and an acclaimed biography of PG Wodehouse. Globish: How the English language became the world's language was published by Penguin books in 2010, and he was appointed Chair of the Board of Trustees of Writers’ Centre Norwich in 2008.
Ellah Allfrey is Deputy Editor of Granta magazine. She worked for five years at Penguin Press before moving to Random House for six years. As Senior Editor, she was responsible for Jonathan Cape’s acclaimed list of African writers as well as editing a wide range of authors including Carmen Callil, Bettany Hughes, Antony Quinn and Julian Barnes and commissioning highly praised and award winning writers such as Dinaw Mengestu, Evie Wyld and Laura Fish. Since joining the Board of WCN she has been active in the organisational changes and expansion of the company.A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Ellah was awarded an OBE in 2011 for services to the publishing industry.
Dame Gillian Beer was recently King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and President of Clare Hall College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.. Her books include Darwin’s Plots, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. From 1992-2002 she was a Trustee of the British Museum, and was Chair of the Poetry Book Society for four years. She has (twice) been a judge for the Booker Prize as well as the Orange Prize and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Both a writer and a critic, she is currently President of the British Comparative Literature Association, the British Literature and Science Society, and on the Council of Arts Council England, East. She was much involved in the Darwin Year, 2009, and is completing a study of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books.
Rachel Calder runs The Sayle Literary Agency based in Cambridge. She started her publishing career as a dogsbody in various publishing offices, including Jonathan Cape, Victor Gollancz and Virago, then joined independent publisher Andre Deutsch as a publicity assistant before becoming a literary agent with the Curtis Brown Group. She went on to work with the highly regarded and greatly loved independent agent Tessa Sayle, and assumed responsibility for the agency in 1993 on Tessa’s death. She is also on the programming committee of the Cambridge WordFest.
Graham Creelman (Vice Chair) is a journalist and film-maker who now runs a consultancy specialising in the creative industries. He is Chair of Governors of Norwich University College of the Arts, and Chair of the City of Norwich Partnership. He’s a former Managing Director of Anglia Television, and former chair of Living East, the Cultural Consortium for the East of England. His extensive TV experience led to him being awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting.
Chris Gribble is the Chief Executive of Writers’ Centre Norwich. After completing a PhD in German Poetry and Philosophy at the University of Manchester, Chris worked in publishing for Carcanet Press and PN Review, then spent several years working as a consultant for the cultural sector and was the Director of Manchester Poetry Festival and then Manchester Literature Festival. He sits of the Advisory Group for Manchester University’s Centre for New Writing, is on the Board of Directors of ICORN (the International Cities of Refuge Network), is Co-Chair of the National Association for Literature Development and a Board Member of Writers’ Centre Norwich as well as Norwich small press Eggbox Publishing. He is also an Artistic Assessor for Arts Council England.
Professor David Peters Corbett’s first degree and MA were in English and American Studies at East Anglia, where he worked with Malcolm Bradbury. His current research is on the connections between the American landscape tradition and the painting of city life in the United States between 1880 and 1930.
He has also published a number of books on British art in the years 1850-1930, which have investigated the relationship between the arts and cultural change. He held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship 2008-10 for his American research and has twice received prizes from the Historians of British Art, College Art Association USA, for his books, while the 2002 edited volume The Geographies of Englishness was also a Guardian book of the year.
He has been a visiting Professor at Yale, has held a number of fellowships at American universities and research foundations, and has been editor of the journal Art History since 2007. He was Terra Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC in 2009-10. His catalogue for the exhibition An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters at the National Gallery in London will appear in spring 2011.
Professor Corbett has supervised nearly twenty PhD theses to successful conclusion and would be interested to hear proposals from prospective students on American art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on transatlantic topics, and on interdisciplinary topics involving the history of American art.
Rebecca Swift was born in 1964, read English at Oxford University and has since worked as an editor and writer. For seven years she worked at Virago Press before she co-founded The Literary Consultancy of which she is currently Director. Rebecca has appeared at numerous literary festivals and on many panels both in the UK and overseas talking about the work of TLC and the relationship between writers and the publishing industry. She has also taught poetry at West Dean College of Further Education, and tutored in life-writing for the Hackney Music Development Trust. In addition to being on the Board for the Writers' Centre Norwich, she is also a trustee of the Maya Centre, as well as a member of the Free Word Consortium. She has published poetry in various anthologies, including Staple Magazine and Vintage New Writing, and written the libretto for 'Spirit Child' an opera by Jenni Roditi, as well as edited for Chatto & Windus Letters from Margaret: The Fascinating Story of Two Babies Swapped at Birth and Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers by A.S. Byatt and psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre.
Bill Thompson is a journalist, commentator and technology critic based in Cambridge. He has been working in, on and around the Internet since 1984. He currently has a weekly column, the BillBoard, which appears in the technology section of the BBC News website, and contributes to other publications both on and off-line, including The Times and The New Statesman. He writes a monthly column for Focus magazine and appears weekly on 'Digital Planet' (formerly called 'Go Digital') on the BBC World Service and occasionally on other radio and television programmes.
Bill is the editor and systems administrator for the
Working 4 an MP website. He is a visiting fellow in the Journalism Department at City University and a Trustee of the Cambridge Film Trust, organisers of the Cambridge Film Festival.
Andrew Yuill joined a family office as Chief Financial Officer at the beginning of 2009 after 18 years with PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he served a wide variety of clients as part of audit, tax and wealth advisory teams. A Chartered Accountant by training, Andrew is also a Chartered Financial Planner.
Emeritus Members
Although no longer active trustees, our Emeritus Members retain strong links with Writers' Centre Norwich.
Jill Dawson is a full-time writer. She is the author of six novels and one poetry pamphlet, and the editor of six anthologies of short- stories and poetry. She has won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry and several short story prizes. Her work has been widely translated and she has twice been nominated for the Orange Prize. Fred & Edie, her third novel, was also short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award. Her novel
The Great Lover, about the poet Rupert Brooke, published in 2009, was a Richard and Judy Summer Read.
As well as novels, Dawson writes film scripts. Watch Me Disappear has been optioned by ITV; she has received three awards for screenplays and is developing her fifth novel,
Wild Boy, for the screen .
In 2006 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University. She has taught Creative Writing for many years, in many different contexts, including community- based projects; adult-education; University and post-graduate courses, including the MA in Creative Writing at UEA and at Bath Spa University. Currently she runs Gold Dust, a mentoring scheme for writers. She has two children and lives in the Cambridgeshire Fens with her husband, the architect, Meredith Bowles.
Rachel Higgs is a partner in the law firm Mills & Reeve, where she specialises in the resolution of commercial disputes. Rachel has acted as a trustee for a number of charitable trusts, including the Norwich Playhouse, focusing on risk management and conflict resolution. She is also an experienced mediator.