Deborah Bosley

Deborah Walker’s writing career began in 1987 with The Rough Guide to California and The Rough Guide to San Francisco. An argument with Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh about the weakness of state-educated English students (where she lied about her A-level grades) led to a regular slot reviewing for the publication throughout the 1990s.

She was encouraged to write her own book under the gentle mentorship of Alice Thomas Ellis and her first novel Let Me Count the Ways (Century, 1996) was runner-up for the Betty Trask Award. This was followed by The Common Touch (Century, 1998) and A Kind of Warfare (Duckworth, 2000). Bringing up her son stalled her concentration until 2007, when she moved into ghostwriting, which she found a fascinating process. Her own fourth novel was a stop-start affair for seven years until 2014, when she abruptly changed direction and began a cheerful tome about mental illness.

Other work has included journalism for the London Evening Standard, The Observer and New Statesman as well as a spell scouting for a Greek publisher. She has been an RLF Fellow at Oxford Brookes and Reading University and is currently the NHS Trust Fellow at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwick. Deborah designed and launched the RLF’s Writing for Self-Expression initiative in Oxford in 2021, and it has since been adopted by NHS Recovery Colleges Nationwide. She is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Northeastern University London.

Deborah Walker is a travel writer and novelist who has worked with the RLF since 2012, first as a Writing Fellow at Oxford Brookes and later at Reading University. She is the founder of the RLF’s Writing for Self-Expression initiative which was launched in Oxford in 2021 and has now been adopted nationwide. She currently works as the RLF Writing for Life Fellow for the NHS Trust at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwick. She says of Writing for Life, ‘finally I know what the point of me is.’