City Literary Institute

AL attended Highbury Hill Grammar School , where she studied the Victorians on her history syllabus and Shakespeare and the Metaphysical poets for A-level English (an exam which, she says, she nearly failed). She got...

According to CA and to the British reference work Who's Who, she went to Thames Polytechnic (which had been formed by merger in 1970 and after further mergers became the University of Greenwich in...

MR read manuscripts for publishers; she taught literature, sexual politics, and creative writing at places like the City Literary Institute or City Lit , Battersea Arts Centre , and the Oval House in Kennington; she...

After leaving her first marriage MR got a position in summer 1987 as Theatre Writer in Residence at Essex University , on the strength of her ideas about theatre and the first play which she...

After early success as a novelist, it began to seem impossible for ZF to combine her three passions—feminism, left-wing politics . . . and novel-writing. She settled for work in journalism instead. She has...

During her early, drifting years AL worked designing woven textiles, but realised in about ten minutes that designing was not for her. She worked as an assistant buyer for various shops, then worked in the...

For two years after that, she was Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at Boston University in Massachusetts. She failed, however, to get a position at the City Literary Institute , and therefore returned to...

MD was a schoolteacher before becoming a full-time professional writer. She taught for two years at the City Literary Institute in Drury Lane, London, before attending King's College . Another teaching experience just after...

KC wrote on Yeats for the London City Lit publication Magma in August 2003. She often reviews for The Guardian.

The essay, Back to my Own Country, considers the ways in which writing has helped AL to understand herself and her heritage (of which, she says, many Caribbean Britons are ignorant because information is...