About

Bounds Green Book Writers is a small group of local fiction writers.

Susie Helme tells the story of how we started

The idea of Bounds Green Book Writers arose from my friendship and collaboration with Elaine. We knew each other from political activity, and discovering that we both wrote, we swapped manuscripts for beta-reading. Her beta-reading skill and wisdom is genius, and over the years, she has given me the most incredible advice.

The next milestone came when I attended an over-50s quiz with a friend and at our table were Rajes and Arlene. Arlene was editor of Dignity, a magazine for elders, and she gave me a job. Rajes and I discovered we were both writers, and I successfully proposed to her the idea of joining up with Elaine to form a writers group. Moreover, our team won the quiz. Arlene later featured an article about the ‘Bounds Green Book Writers’ in her magazine, so it was she who gave us our name. (I can’t remember what we called ourselves before).

Four of our members published novels while working with us. My first novel, The Lost Wisdom of the Magi, just sat in my hard drive for ten years, before these gals gave me the courage to launch it into the world. Elaine said it was the same with her sci-fi masterpiece The Caduca.

We also had for a while Ann and Lynda, whom I hope will rejoin us at some point. Lynda’s YA novel Looked After Boy was published while she was with us. And we hope to see Ann’s Irish saga Women on the Cusp published someday soon.

Mark contacted us via our blog, we discovered he lived not far from Bounds Green and invited him to join us, so we are now co-ed.

BGBW is a writers group with a difference. We don’t just sit around drinking tea. We meet monthly at my house (in Bounds Green) and swap beta-reading. But we also, at each meeting, have a presentation by one of us on some topic or skill relating to writing. These presentations are then repackaged and posted on our ‘Writing advice and comment’ blog on creative writing techniques. During the ensuing month we swap chapters of our books in progress and do ‘homework’, exercises practicing the skills we learned from the presentation, which we also post on our blog.

During the Covid pandemic, we were lonely, so we published the online Lockdown Lit — ‘a collection of creative writing inspired by the coronavirus experience’, for which we solicited contributions from all over.

In 2025, BGBW agreed to form a publishing venture called Green Bounds Books. Look forward to first venture into self-publishing, All Points Imagination, an anthology of our short stories, plus some contributions from authors we like. All Points Imagination will be launched as an ebook, to be followed by a print-on-demand paperback.