About Us
Our Story
Founded in 2020 by Kathryn Bevis, The Writing School is here to help you find your creative voice. Our team of experienced, award-winning tutors are all working writers and offer personalised guidance through our courses. We offer a range of short and long courses to suit writers at any level. Whether you have a track record of publication or are just starting out, we can provide the support you need to bring your ideas to life. Explore your creativity from home with our engaging, professional courses. Let's write together!
Our Founder
The Writing School was founded in 2020 by Kathryn Bevis, the hugely talented poet and teacher, who is deeply missed by everyone who knew her and by readers who knew her through her work.
Her poetic career was brilliant and within a few years of beginning to write full-time she rose to national prominence, as a poet of huge ability and imagination. Kathryn’s poems first came to the notice of leading journals including Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, The London Magazine, Wasafiri, Mslexia, The North Magazine and the TLS. Her work would also go onto have several notable competition successes including the Wales Poetry Award, the inaugural Crysse Morrison Award, the Second Light Poetry Competition, the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry and the Poetry Society Members’ Competition. In 2023 ‘My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. In 2024 'Everyone will be there’ was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Kathryn was also proud to serve as the Hampshire Poet Laureate.
Kathryn’s body of work is collected in two published volumes. 2022’s Flamingo was one of the Poetry Society’s ‘Books of the Year’ and The Butterfly House in 2024 emerged to hugely positive reviews. Both books demonstrate her incredible skill, musicality and imagination through superb poems on animals, love, memory and family. Her poems are available from her publisher Seren: https://www.serenbooks.com/seren-author/kathryn-bevis/
The afterlife of her work looks assured, and her late poems particularly are an inspiration and consolation to those living with illness. Her poems dealing with her own cancer will become long-lived part of the English canon and are some of the most humane and beautiful reflections on love and mortality written in this century.
As well as a brilliant individual artist Kathryn was also an incredible champion of poetry, and a builder of artistic communities. She supported the Winchester Poetry Festival for a decade and they have devoted a prize to her memory to mark her contribution: The Kathryn Bevis Prize is awarded annually to an outstanding Hampshire writer.
Kathryn also launched innumerable poetic careers with her kind, thoughtful and encouraging teaching, both through The Writing School and beyond. So many wonderful poets are working today, being published and winning prizes after she helped them to recognise, believe in and develop their talent. She believed in making the arts accessible, teaching in the prison system, libraries and anywhere there was a space to help people unlock their imagination. She also offered scholarships to many poets and we continue that tradition now in order that no-one be marginalised from writing by their financial resources.
Kathryn had the vision to plant a poetic orchard that she would not live to see ripen to maturity, but her legacy bequeaths us decades of harvest that we enjoy thankfully in her name. She is much missed by everyone associated with The Writing School.
Kathryn Bevis
The poets we work with
Jonathan Edwards
Poet and teacher. Tutor for online courses.
Jeanette Burton
Poet & Teacher for our Small Group, Online Courses
Carole Bromley
Poet and teacher. Tutor for our online courses.
Ella Frears
Poet, artist and teacher. Tutor for online courses.
Kathryn Bevis
Founder of The Writing School.
At the Writing School we are proud to offer teaching and tuition from some of the UK's leading poets, writers and illustrators. Between them they offer huge experience including numerous publications and literary prizes.
Click on any images to view full biography.
Simon Maddrell
Poet and teacher. Tutor for online course.
Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards is the tutor for our Digital Poetry Retreats and is a firm favourite with our participants (check out the testimonials, here!). His first collection, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection, Gen (Seren, 2018), also received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. His poem 'Bridge' was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2019 and he has received prizes in the Ledbury Festival International Poetry Competition, the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. He has read his poems on BBC radio and television and at festivals around the world, recorded them for the Poetry Archive and led workshops in schools, universities and prisons. He lives in Crosskeys, South Wales.
Simon Maddrell
Simon Maddrell is a poet, editor, educator and wellbeing facilitator. Over 200 of his poems have been published in 26 anthologies and 80 magazines in the last six years, bringing a vast experience of mistakes & rejection. Their poems have appeared in magazines such as AMBIT, Acumen, Gutter, Magma, Propel, Poetry Wales, SAND, Southword, Stand, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The London Magazine, The Rialto, Under the Radar and Ink Sweat & Tears. Simon has also had seven poetry pamphlets published since 2020. Their debut collection, lamping wild rabbits, was published by Out-Spoken Press in Feb 2026 and Simon's collection has been long listed for the 2026 Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection.
Jeanette Burton
Jeanette Burton is a poet and English teacher from Belper in Derbyshire. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University and has taught creative writing to students in the post-16 sector.
Her poetry appears in Poetry Wales, Mslexia, and in two Candlestick Press pamphlets. She has been placed in several competitions, including commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2022, highly commended in both the Wales Poetry Award 2021 and the Teignmouth Poetry Festival Open Competition 2022. She was awarded first place in the McLellan Poetry Prize 2021 and the Ware Poetry Prize 2022. Her pamphlet, What is this a family outing? was shortlisted for the inaugural Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition 2021.
Carole Bromley
Carole's poems have been widely published in magazines including Poetry Review, Poetry News, The North, Magma, Mslexia, The Rialto, Strix, Coast to Coast to Coast and Butcher’s Dog and she has twice been a winner in the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition. She has two pamphlets, Unscheduled Halt (2004) and Skylight (2009) and three collections, A Guided Tour of the Ice House (2011), The Stonegate Devil (2015) and Blast Off (2017) with Smith/Doorstop, The Peregrine Falcons of York Minster (2020) with Valley Press and Sodium 136 (2019) with Calder Valley. Carole's new collection aimed at visitors to York of all ages was published in August 2026. The poems in Ghosts and Ginnels (Ings Press) were written for children though adults also enjoy them!
Ella Frears
Ella Frears is a poet and artist originally from Cornwall, now based in London. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling, (Corsair, 2020) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Goodlord (Rough Trade Books & Corsair 2024), a hybrid work which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Sky Arts Award for Times Breakthrough Artist of the Year. Ella is this year’s Poetry Fellow at University East Anglia.
Ella’s poems have been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Turkish, Slovak, and Cornish. She has performed internationally at Galle literary festival in Sri Lanka, at the Istanbul Poetry festival in Turkey, as well as at events in Copenhagen, Kristiansand, Frankfurt, Groningen, Lisbon, Milan, and Lugano. Ella will be at Singapore Writers Festival, and Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia this year.
Kathryn Bevis
Kathryn Bevis is Former Hampshire Laureate and Founder of The Writing School Online. Her poems have appeared in journals and magazines like: Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, Wasafiri, The London Magazine, and Mslexia. In the past year, her poems have been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Written category), awarded a Hosking House Trust Residency, won the Wales Poetry Award, the Crysse Morrison Poetry Award, and the Second Light Poetry Competition, and co-won the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry and the Poetry Society Members’ Competition.
Flamingo is her debut chapbook (Seren: 2022). It was recently named as one of the Poetry Society’s ‘Books of the Year’ and shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Pamphlet. Her debut full collection, The Butterfly House was published in March 2024 with Seren.
