Once upon a time I decided to be a creative writing coach for children. I was born in the beautiful blue city of Barcelona where I trained to be a Tax Lawyer. One Autumn I attended a series of lessons on Hamlet at the English Studies Faculty in Barcelona and a few months after I moved to London. Maybe I had heard the call of the English language. That was almost twenty years ago and the love story has endured.
I took an MA on Bilingual Literary Translation at Westminster University and later on a second MA on Comparative Literature at King’s College. I am now a freelance literary translator from English into Spanish, my last published translations in Spain are TimeRiders I and II, the first two books of a time travelling series by Scarrow for 11+ that have been a bestseller in England.
I have my dream jobs working with children at The Story Room and with families and children at The Tate as a Tate Early Years and Families workshop innovator. I also volunteer as a Writing Mentor at The Ministry of Stories and I have attended multiple Creative Writing courses and workshops at City Lit, Birkbeck College and Arvon which have helped me immensely both in my own writing but also in enabling children to free their own creativity. I am also a qualified Neuro Linguistic Programming coach, which is helpful when children are stuck in a negative self-limiting belief and are really convinced they are ‘not creative’.
As an aspiring author I am working towards the publication of two Tales for children and a collection of Short Stories for grown ups.
My favourite part of working as a writing coach is when a child comes to a workshop and looks down thinking he cannot ‘write’ anything because he does not ‘know what to write’ and then leaves proud and smiling, eager to show something he has ‘written’ and was ‘so easy to write’! The next time he attends, the only question is ‘what are we going to be writing about today?’. It’s amazing to see the transformation when children see that writing is not such a daunting task anymore.
I look forward to meeting your children at The Story Room workshops.
Àngels G.Vila
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