About Us

Leicester Writers’ Club is a long established community of writers, based in Leicester but also catering for members who join on-line for our Thursday night meetings that run to a hybrid ‘streamed’ format of in-person and remote participation.  The club aims to assist members’ creative development by pooling knowledge and practical experience, and providing constructive criticism for work in progress.  The club was founded over 60 years ago, and its many members write within a wide range of genres — poetry, flash fiction, short stories, full length fiction in all genres, plays, screenplays and non-fiction (including everything from serious academic texts to blogs).  Find out more about membership on our Membership Page. 

Club activities also include an annual programme of speaker events which are open to the general public. Recent speakers have included (from left to right above): the poet, author and publishing editor, Jacob Ross; best selling authors, Mark Edwards and Louise Jensen; and literary agent Hellie Ogden.  Our three most recent speakers were the NY Times best selling author, Chris d’Lacey  the poet Dorothea Smartt and Marc Gascoigne, a 40-year veteran of fantasy publishing and the founder of Angry Robot (all pictured below).

There are social events too.  The club hosts an annual awards dinner, provides Saturday Masterclasses from leading experts in their field (mostly drawn from our own membership), organises club writing competitions and arranges residential weekends every May at an atmospheric old farm in the Cotswolds.

Our annual awards dinners give us the chance to celebrate the successes of our members. In 2024, we had the usual wide array of faces of writers across all genres.

These awards events have also featured after-dinner speakers, such as the local alternate history, fantasy and contemporary crime fiction author, Rod Duncan (pictured centre below).  In 2022,  the club’s annual short story competition was judged by Mahsuda Snaith, a former member and winner of the Bristol Short Story Prize, the SI Leeds Prize and author of ‘The Things We Thought We Knew’ & ‘How to Find Home’.  In 2023, our competition judge was Divya Ghelani, another former club member, now writer in residence in Berlin (pictured to the right below).

You will find Leicester Writers’ Club is on Facebook and X (the former Twitter) @leicwritersclub. If you would like to keep up with happenings or be informed of future events, please click the ‘Follow’ button at the bottom to follow our site.  If you have any questions regarding membership, or any other writing-related-thing, please leave your details on our Contact Us page.

Links to some of our Prominent Members’ online presence:

• Helen Cooper Writer’s Website (Our President)
• D.N. Martin Writer’s Website (Our Web Master)
• Mark Brandon (Our Vice-President) Writer’s Website
• Emma Lee Blog (Our Treasurer)
• Chris d’Lacey Writer’s Website
• Paige Worrall Non-Fiction Website
• Julia Wood Writer’s Website