• Inspire: Exciting Ways of Teaching Creative Writing

    An anthology written by creative teachers with diverse experience. The focus is on how to teach creative writing in imaginative, practical and socially just ways, helping people of all ages and backgrounds to write.

  • Get a free copy of ‘Who Do You Love’ on audio here!

    Blue Door Press is delighted to announce that the audiobook version of Who Do You Love (BDP 2017) is now available for sale on Audible, Amazon and iTunes. It was quite a journey working with the voice artist and actor Christopher James on the novel during this lockdown period. He and I talked quite intensely…

  • Snow on the Danube: a wartime thriller and romance

    A thrilling historical adventure story set in war-torn Budapest. This story of one man’s quest to save his family, his friends — and, perhaps, his soul — is an unlikely comedy, a document of filial love and a compelling portrait of the horrors of war.

  • My Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Audio Book is now published: free copies available, read more here!

    A discussion about the creation of my audio book for my best selling study guide on the novel ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’.

  • What happened to the New Man?

    As I’ve pointed out in previous blogs, the process of listening to the audiobook of Who Do You Love has been enriching for me, making me return to the text some years after writing it. Christopher James  reads the book more slowly than me, taking his time, giving the narrator’s voice a melancholic, deadpan quality.…

  • Listen to the first 15 mins of Who Do You Love for free here!

    I’m writing this blog post on the summer solstice, 20th June 2020, which is an important date in my novel Who Do You Love. In fact, I like to think the events on the summer solstice June 1988 in a Sussex wood, devastated by the hurricane of October 1987, are pivotal in the novel. They…

  • Making an audio book of my Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde study guide

    I’m very excited to announce that the marvellous actor and audiobook reader Richard Bunn will be reading my bestselling study guide ‘Analysis and Study Guide: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. The book has proved to be one of my popular books over the years and has continued to sell well. I was impressed by all…

  • Making an audio book out of my novel, Who Do You Love

    I’m very excited to be working on an audio book version of Who Do You Love, my novel which I published with Blue Door Press in 2017. I have investigated ways of doing this over the years, having a go at reading myself. I found that although I can be an expressive reader — some…

  • The Time Devil

    A fantastic time-travelling story in the format of a ‘teaching script’, which helps teenage readers improve their ability to skim, scan, summarise, and ask questions.

  • Who Do You Love

    By turns comic, tragic and romantic, Who Do You Love is a stirring novel which explores the big issues of passion, death and grief; a fast-paced contemporary love story but also moving exploration of what it means to be alive today.

  • Five Ways to Revolutionise Reading in Your School

    These suggestions are based on the points raised at the Reading Revolution Conference held at Goldsmiths, University of London on Saturday 23rd September 2017. ONE: Encourage Reading for Pleasure Read for the sake of reading. Read aloud, read in groups, read in pairs, read silently. Read poems, stories, articles, blogs, relevant social media and so…

  • The Mindful English Teacher: A Toolkit for Learning and Well-Being

    This unique guide aims to inject a genuine sense of joy into English teaching, using techniques that have been proven to work in a wide range of educational settings.

  • Shakespeare as cultural capital

    This article, in a slightly different form was initially published on the Teachit website. Shakespeare as Cultural Capital by Francis Gilbert on Scribd

  • How can we help secondary school students read for pleasure and improve their reading skills? #GdnBLReading

    Yesterday I spoke at the Guardian Education Centre for a conference on Reading for Pleasure in the secondary classroom. The Guardian’s literary editor, Claire Armistead, kicked off the day by explaining that we need our young people to enjoy reading and to read whole texts which are not part of the curriculum; she pointed out…

  • Reciprocal Teaching and the Time Devil

    I’ve been working hard at helping Key Stage 3 students in Deptford Green school, a London comprehensive, to develop their reading skills. To that end, I have written a book, The Time Devil, which is set partly in Deptford Green and partly in the National Maritime Museum, whom we are also working with.  I have…

  • Summer Solstice Readings for National Writing Day at the Word Bookshop, New Cross

    I had a very enjoyable day at Goldsmiths on the summer solstice to celebrate National Writing Day. The summer solstice is: “the time at which the sun is at its northernmost point in the sky (southernmost point in the South hemisphere), appearing at noon at its highest altitude above the horizon.” It is midsummer; the…

  • Improving students’ reading using Reciprocal Teaching

      Respected research has shown for some time that certain teaching approaches are particularly effective at improving students’ reading skills; one such strategy is called Reciprocal Teaching (Oczkus, 2010:Palincsar and Brown, 1984) which gets learners reading in groups. I’ve written about the success of this strategy in two previous issues of NATE Magazine (June 2015/June…

  • 7 Things I Loved About Min Jin Lee’s great novel ‘Pachinko’

    The page-turning story which is rooted in historical facts. Pachinko is nearly 500 pages long but you can’t stop turning the pages once you start reading it. From the start, you’re immersed in the family saga of Sunja, the loved daughter of Hoonie, who was born with a “cleft palate and a twisted foot”, and…

  • Why it’s good news that sex education is being made compulsory in schools

    This blog post contains a video of me being interviewed on Channel 5 news about the introduction of new sex education guidance by the government.

  • The Dark Alleyway

    To my mind, Creative Writing (CW) currently languishes like a frightened animal in one of the curriculum’s darker alleyways, shivering and rather worried about its prospects. Having been an English teacher for twenty-five years in various comprehensives and now a Lecturer in PGCE English at Goldsmiths, which involves visiting many schools, I have both taught…