Royal Literary Fund Fellow

The Royal Literary Fund Fellows will return in September for the 2025-2026 academic year.

In the meantime we suggest these sources of support for your writing

Royal Literary Fund resources for students

Institute for Academic Development

What we offer

Sessions are tailored to your needs: this could mean support with planning and structure, advice on clarity and working to a word limit, help with editing, grammar and punctuation, or any other issue you want to bring.

All academic writing is covered including essays, reports, theses, dissertations, book chapters, posters etc. Advice is based on your writing and tailored to your needs and aims.

Please note that due to funding restrictions this service is only available to students in the UK (you cannot have an online session when you are abroad).

What you can expect:

• Free of charge.
• One-to-one consultation, lasting 50 minutes.
• Advice unique to your requirements.
• Confidential support.

What we don't do:

• proof-read your work
• teach English as a second language
• provide specialist support for specific learning disabilities

Learn more: RLF Fellowship Scheme

Our RLF Fellows in 2025-2026

Isabel Adey

Isabel Adey is a Yorkshire-born literary translator and bilingual editor based in Edinburgh.

She was longlisted two years in a row for the Queen Sofia Translation Prize for the best English translation of a work originally written in Spanish (for Giovanna Rivero’s Fresh Dirt from the Grave in 2024, and for her co-translation with Charlotte Coombe of Marvel Moreno’s December Breeze, which made it onto the shortlist in 2023). She is also a former winner of the Goethe Institute’s Emerging Translator Programme (2014) for her work from German into English. Her translation of Alfons Kaiser’s Karl Lagerfeld: A Life in Fashion was named a Financial Times Book of the Year 2023. Works recently translated include the cult novel 98 Seconds Without a Shadow by Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero (Charco Press, 2026) and The Not-To-Do List, an alternative self-help book by Swiss writer Rolf Dobelli (Allen & Unwin, 2025). She also regularly translates academic articles for Art in Translation and content for galleries, museums, anthologies and high-profile art and design publishers.

Her work spans multiple disciplines, from literary fiction to nonfiction, academia, children’s books and YA fiction. She is interested in writing that deals with cultural identity, class politics and migration. She is a respected, meticulous editor of English translations, having worked on books originally written by authors including Selim Özdoğan, Anna Pazos and Cemile Sahin.

Adey holds an MSc in Translation from Heriot-Watt University (2011) and an MA in Modern European Languages from the University of Edinburgh (2009, first class with distinction). She has taught translation practice to postgraduate level and has a background in ESL instruction. She has held residencies and attended workshops at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Lausanne, the Arvon Foundation, and the British Centre for Literary Translation & International Creative Writing. 

She is particularly interested in widening access to literature and learning.

Lesley Glaister

Lesley Glaister is a novelist, poet, playwright and teacher of creative writing. She’s published seventeen novels, most recently Blasted Things and A Particular Man. Her writing contains elements of historical, psychological and suspense fiction, though it resists categorisation into one genre. Often darkly funny, the novels are concerned most of all with voice, character, and the resilience of the human spirit. 

For her first novel, Honour Thy Father, Lesley won both a Somerset Maugham and a Betty Trask Award. Little Egypt was awarded a Jerwood Unbound Prize, and her work has been long and shortlisted for several major prizes.

She has had several residencies including at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She was writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh between 2008 and 2011.

Lesley’s most recent post was at the University of St Andrews where she taught Creative Writing. She mentors novelists and teaches on residential, or more recently online, writing courses, including The Arvon Foundation and the Mslexia Novel School. Lesley is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

For more information about Lesley, please visit her website:

Lesley Glaister homepage

Lucy Ribchester

Lucy Ribchester is a novelist, short story writer and journalist based in Edinburgh. She has written three historical crime fiction novels under her own name, and two contemporary thrillers as Elle Connel. Her first novel, The Hourglass Factory, was longlisted for the Historical Writers Association Debut crown, picked by Val McDermid for her New Blood panel at Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival, and selected by Waterstones’ Edinburgh branches as their Book of the Year. Her most recent novel, Murder Ballad, is set in Edinburgh’s 18^th century music scene and explores the relationship between a street ballad singer and a female classical composer. 

Lucy has been awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers award and a Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Costa Short Story award and Manchester Fiction prize, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.  

Lucy also writes regularly for The List magazine, covering dance, drag, books and children’s theatre. She is a regular leader of creative writing workshops, and has led sessions in schools, libraries, community groups and prisons. Her particular passion is developing the confidence and skills of emerging readers and writers.  

 For more information about Lucy, please visit her website:

Lucy Ribchester homepage

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