Join our friends Rough Trade Books and Real Magic Books in Wendover, Buckinghamshire (less than an hour’s journey from London) for a series of day-long writing workshops with counter-cultural panache.
Each of the four ‘Rough Magic Days’ over the course of 2025 will provide the opportunity to spend time with a different RTB author — covering genres including poetry, fiction, life-writing and the art of the short story. Each event will also include a walk and talk in the Chiltern Hills with RTB editor and Caught by the River poet-in-residence Will Burns, as well as a reading and drink in the King and Queen pub.
SATURDAY 22nd FEBRUARY – POETRY WITH ELLA FREARS
Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Her collection Shine, Darling (2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Goodlord: An Email (2024) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection as well as the Sky Arts Awards. She has held residencies and fellowships for the Tate Gallery, the National Trust, Royal Holloway University physics department, John Hansard Gallery, the Dartington Trust, 16 motorway service stations, the number 17 bus in Southampton, and Exeter University’s environmental history department. She is currently the RLF Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She hosts “Tears for Frears” on Soho Radio.
SATURDAY 19th APRIL – FICTION WITH SHEENA PATEL
Sheena Patel is a writer and assistant director for the film and TV industry. She is part of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE collective and her debut novel I‘m a Fan won the Discover Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2023, has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and finalist in the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Category for the L.A. Times Book Prize. It was Foyles Fiction Book of the Year 2022 and an Observer Best Debut Novel of 2022.
SATURDAY 21st JUNE – LIFE-WRITING WITH MUSA OKWONGA
Musa Okwonga is an award-winning author whose work explores society, politics and race. The co-host of the Stadio football podcast with Ryan Hunn, he studied law at St. John’s College, University of Oxford, where he is now an Honorary Fellow. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has written seven books. Recent publications include: One of Them: An Eton College Memoir (2021), In The End, It Was All About Love (2021), and Striking Out (co-authored with Ian Wright) (2021), winner of the 2022 Sunday Times Children’s Sports Book of the Year Award. He lives and works in Berlin.
SATURDAY 13th SEPTEMBER – SHORT STORY WITH WENDY ERSKINE
Wendy Erskine’s two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move, are published by The Stinging Fly Press and Picador. She has been listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Edge Hill Prize. She was awarded the Butler Prize for Literature and the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize. Dance Move was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. Her writing on arts of all kinds, from sculpture to body-building, has been published in the Guardian and the Quietus among others, and for PVA Books she edited well I just kind of like it, an anthology about art in the home and the home as art. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is a frequent broadcaster, interviewer and willing collaborator on all manner of projects. She is also a secondary school teacher in Belfast. Her debut novel The Benefactors is out in June and published by Sceptre.
Find out more about the events, and book your place (£100 per session), via the Rough Trade Books website.