Fact-based Storytelling

Understand how to structure your longform non-fiction writing, plan your progress, build dramatic tension, how to create character and instill a sense of place and time.

Over 5 fortnightly Wednesday evenings, you will look at the way narrative drives different genres including memoir, biography, travel and food writing.

The course centres on providing support and ideas via discussion and feedback for your own specific projects, possibly started in Narrative Non-Fiction.

One scholarship available. A fully funded place is available for a young adult (18-25) from an underrepresented background and/or facing financial difficulty. To apply for this, please contact Jem Bartholomew outlining why you'd like to attend.

Please apply no less than two weeks before the start date.

Who is it for?

This London-based course is aimed at those who wish to enhance their skills in non-fiction writing. This series of storytelling workshops is taught over five Wednesday classes and delivered by a professional writer. Over the 5 fortnightly sessions you will develop your own work, learning from the group and tutor feedback and discussion.

Timetable

Over 5 fortnightly Wednesdays you will look at the way narrative drives different genres including memoir, biography, travel and food writing.

Benefits

Inspirational, informative and thought-provoking, these inventive fact-based storytelling Wednesday workshops are about developing longer pieces of compelling narrative based on accuracy, honesty and truth.

Alumni Successes

Hugo Harvey, won first prize in the Orwell Society Society/NUJ Young Journalist’s Award 2026. 'The guidance I received on City St George’s Fact-Based Storytelling short course with Jem Bartholomew gave me the skills and confidence to put myself forward for writing competitions like this. I’m also very grateful for the scholarship I received, without which I would not have been able to take the course,' Hugo Harvey

Clarissa Brincat published her first piece in The Guardian.

Over the course of five Saturday classes on the Fact-based Storytelling short course, you will learn:

• Methods for gathering material across non-fiction genres.
• How to conjure character.
• How to instil a sense of time and place.
• Structuring your longform work.
• Developing your writing practice and writer’s voice.
• Students will receive personalised tutor feedback on their assignments; and
• student writing will be discussed constructively and collaboratively in class.

One scholarship available. A fully funded place is available for a young adult (18-25) from an underrepresented background and/or facing financial difficulty. To apply for this, please contact Jem Bartholomew outlining why you'd like to attend."

There will be no formal assessment in this storytelling course. Teaching will be through discussion and exercises and your work will be shared with the group for discussion and input.

Students who complete 70% of the classes will receive a Certificate of completion at the end of the course.

No specific qualifications are necessary but students are advised to take the Narrative Non-Fiction course before embarking on the Fact-based Storytelling course.

English requirements

You will need a good level of spoken and written English to enrol on this course.

There is no formal reading list. But the list of books below—across a variety of genres such as reportage, memoir, history and essay—are brilliant introductions to the craft of longform nonfiction. You may find them useful to consult while working on your own projects, both during and beyond the short course.

• John Hershey, Hiroshima, 1946
• Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968, and The White Album, 1979
• Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief, 1998
• David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, 1993
• Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment, 2019
• Tom Clark (ed.), Broke: Fixing Britain’s Poverty Crisis, 2023
• Sally Hayden, My Fourth Time, We Drowned, 2022
• Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, 2021
• John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, 2018
• Lisa Taddeo, Three Women, 2019
• Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing:A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, 2018
• David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, 2017
• Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, 2003
• Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, 2016
• Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, 2021
• George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937
• Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty–First Century, 2017
• Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, 2000
• Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia, 1977
• Robert Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, 2019.