Practical Writing Advice - "Writing Without Bannisters - on Storytelling and Attention"

With Julia Bell and Jon Day.

The stories we tell give us away - what we notice, what we leave out, what we're brave enough to say. They reveal who we are and what we're willing to fight for. At a moment when our attention is being hijacked, our language flattened, and our thinking outsourced, writing alongside other people is starting to look like a political act: speaking, thinking, and making without bannisters, in the company of others rather than alone in front of a screen.

In her new book Between the Lines, Julia Bell draws on almost thirty years inside the writing workshop - the room where writers from across the world meet to read each other and work out what they're really trying to say. She'll be in conversation with Jon Day, Reader in Creative Writing at King's.

Expect a conversation about the craft of writing, the fight for our attention, and the future of creativity under pressure and some practical tips on how to improve your work. Whether you're deep into something or just starting out, come and join us.

Julia Bell is Professor of New Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, where she has taught creative writing for nearly thirty years. She is the author of Between the Lines (Simon & Schuster, 2026), a book about the writing workshop and what happens inside it; Radical Attention (2020, reissued 2026 with a new introduction by Grace Blakeley), an essay on focus, distraction, and creativity; and the memoir in verse Hymnal (Parthian, 2024), which returns to the religious landscape of her Welsh childhood. Her essays and journalism have appeared widely, and she writes a Substack at professorbell.substack.com. 

Jon Day is a writer, critic, and academic. He joined King’s in 2014 after completing a DPhil on modernist fiction, neurology, and the philosophy of mind at St John’s College, Oxford, where he also studied for his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. His resulting monograph, Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia (EUP, 2020), explores the philosophical problem of qualia in relation to modernist fiction. He is the author of three works of creative non-fiction: an investigative memoir, The Pilgrims’ Castle (John Murray, 2025); Cyclogeography (Notting Hill Editions, 2015), about bicycles, landscapes, and his time as a bicycle courier; and Homing (John Murray, 2019), about pigeons, places, and the idea of home. His edited collection of fishing writing, A Twitch Upon the Thread (NHE), was published in 2019.