Debut Guardian feature
A very brief blog post!
Really pleased to have written a feature for the Guardian, which came out last Friday. It’s on Górecki’s Third Symphony - the famous recording of which has just turned 30 - and you can read it here!
I’m a freelance writer, editor and certified gold-standard journalist with a background in classical music and ballet.
I’m also a Journalism Tutor at News Associates in Manchester, where I work four days a week.
As a freelance writer I've worked broadly: journalism for the Guardian, Gramophone and Mancunian Matters, copywriting for Blinkist and Wise, specialist programme notes for the Royal Opera House and St John's Smith Square. I used to have a newspaper column, too, for the German paper Volksstimme.
I have just as much experience as an editor. A Professional member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (formerly the SfEP), I edit academic and trade books, plus a few smaller projects. I used to produce the red programme books for The Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, and before that I was Editor of the website Bachtrack, curating journalistic coverage of the classical music scene around the world.
Though I’ve been working in journalism for my whole career, I only took my NCTJ diploma relatively recently. Studying on the part-time course at News Associates Manchester, I achieved gold standard, with 100 words per minute shorthand and straight As in my exams. I was Highly Commended in the Student of the Year category at the NCTJ Awards for Excellence 2021, meaning that my exam results were in the top three out of 1,407.
My background is in music: I have MA and MPhil degrees in music and musicology from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. In 2017 I was shortlisted for the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism.
Find out more about my writing and my editing on this site, or you’re welcome to get in touch with me at [javascript protected email address].
A very brief blog post!
Really pleased to have written a feature for the Guardian, which came out last Friday. It’s on Górecki’s Third Symphony - the famous recording of which has just turned 30 - and you can read it here!
A few weeks ago, not long after having some copywriting work cancelled, I was browsing LinkedIn and saw an ad for an AI copywriter.
So I decided to give it a spin, and size up the competition.
Be warned, human copywriters! This is what we are up against. It’s called Anyword, and it seems to know a heck of a lot about me. Sadly much of it is nonsense.
It’s easy to use, I’ll give it that. I fed it my website URL, and it came up with all sorts of stuff. Here are a few of its more eyebrow-raising suggestions.
I have never kept a bee in my life.
Read More »Sometimes it’s good to be superficial. Here’s a photo of my face. Let me explain.
Saying something is superficial usually means it lacks depth; it’s a pejorative, suggesting that ‘substance’ is being ignored in favour of ‘style’. But I wonder if the style < substance hierarchy is kind of nonsense.
Read More »I’ve just launched (after far too many months of planning) a new project, the website Talking Writing Music. This blog will feature detailed interviews with a range of contemporary composers, and I hope will prove interesting both to people involved in contemporary music, and to a wider audiences of curious individuals.
Please take a look – feedback is welcome, and if you have any queries or want to ask about possibly being featured, feel free to get in touch. No promises, though, as I’m doing this in my free time…
I wrote this column about a minor but upsetting incident in Aldi.
I like pretzels. I also like my online editor’s decision to file this piece under the category “Lye roll”.
I found a German catalogue that had a ‘British’ style of clothing and household items and it was meant to be fashionable.
Every New Year’s Eve, the whole of Germany watches the same old British comedy sketch. The quaint, preposterous vision of Britan this sketch depicts is drifting back into view as Brexit nears.
Time to brush up on your German. My Christmas gift to Volksstimme was a description of a traditional British Christmas.
German people don’t drink water. It’s weird.
German people are strangely calm in situations in which some other people would go totally nuts. Election night was a good example of this.
German shops sell different things to British shops. That is what this column is about.
Volksstimme column number 2 - my crippling lack of German. Also falafels.
My first column for Volksstimme is about attitudes to trust in both countries. I also discuss shopping trollies.
I did not write, but thoroughly approve of, the subhead ‘Moment of panic in supermarket’.
Also available auf Deutsch.
Ahead of my regular column for Volksstimme, the newspaper interviewed me about my move to Germany. I talk about hummus and doors, mainly. (Also Brexit.)
Also available auf Deutsch.