How to use your personal history to write non-fiction

A creative and encouraging workshop to help get your writing moving, with Sheela Banerjee and Lucy Fulford!

Would you like to write using your own personal history as inspiration?

 Do you have memories, fragments of family folklore, or a migration story that you want to shape into a narrative? Perhaps you’ve always wanted to write about your grandparents, or there’s a faded photograph from the seventies that’s calling to you from the past? Whatever personal stories you have, we’d love to help you turn these into compelling writing.

 Whether you’re a beginner and want to develop an idea or are an experienced writer who’d enjoy an evening of writing magic, come and join non-fiction authors Sheela Banerjee and Lucy Fulford for this encouraging and inspiring writing workshop. You’ll get stuck into writing exercises, come away with fresh ideas and tips on how to turn these into a book, essay or story!  

Sheela Banerjee’s debut What’s In A Name? (Hachette/Hodder) is a New Statesman Book of the Year and won the Eastern Eye Award for Best Non-Fiction 2024. It traces the stories behind her own name and those of her best friends. Blending memoir, history and politics, it travels across centuries and continents – from west London to British India, and from 1960s Jamaica to pre-Revolutionary Russia – and also tells the story of twentieth-century immigration to the UK.

Lucy Fulford is a journalist and author who focuses on migration, identity and conflict. Her debut book, The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus (Hachette/Hodder) weaves together memoir, history and testimony to reveal this overlooked period of post-colonial history, when Idi Amin expelled 50,000 South Asians from Uganda. The Exiled was longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown Award 2024 and Lucy’s writing has been published in The Guardian, New York Times, CNN and Glamour.