Olivia Gordon
e:olivia@oliviagordon.com
A former staff features writer for Real, I now write freelance for many national newspapers and magazines, including:
The Observer (Observer Woman, Observer Food Monthly, Observer Review)
The Guardian (G2)
The Telegraph (Sunday Telegraph Stella magazine; Seven arts and culture supplement; The Telegraph)
The Times (Sunday Times Style; T2)
The Mail (You magazine; The Daily Mail's Femail & Good Health)
The Evening Standard
She
Red
Cosmo Bride
First
Psychologies
Tatler
NW (New Woman)
Essentials
TVHits!
Real People
Closer
Real
Woman's Own
The Bookseller
The Jewish Chronicle
The Australian
NHS.uk
Design Council Magazine
Ethos Journal
ichild.co.uk
VIVA (Dubai)
You magazine (South Africa)
Wish magazine (Australia)
I also undertake freelance editing/proofing, and inhouse features shifts for publishing houses including Emap (covering as deputy features editor for NW), Natmags (on features desk at Real People), IPC (on features desk at Woman's Own) and VNU (news reporting for The Bookseller).
4 June 2008: I'm delighted to have joined the team of the:101, a group of journalists who provide training for PR professionals on how to work more effectively with the media. the:101 provides a range of courses covering key media relations skills such as selling in stories, writing great press releases and developing compelling feature ideas. I'll be training PRs on the Nationals, Women and health and Phone pitching workshops.
January 2008: An extract from my novel-in-progress is published in Bedford Square (John Murray, £7.99), an anthology of writing from the Royal Holloway MA in Creative Writing, with Andrew Motion, Jo Shapcott and Susanna Jones. I am currently working on a proposal for a non-fiction book and have been taken on by London literary agent Andrew Lownie.
My first book, The Agony of Ecstasy , (Continuum, £6.99) is a personal philosophical enquiry into the metaphysical issues introduced to society by the drug Ecstasy and other common substances like antidepressants: the nature of the experience of happiness, whether happiness is something which can be artificially induced, and whether chemically-created happiness is authentic. I was commissioned to write the book at 23 after an editor read a feature I had written for the Evening Standard, and it was published when I was 25 in 2004.
In 2007, an extract from The Agony of Ecstasy was included in Cape Town Calling, a South African anthology of contemporary writing on 'the mother city' including international travel writers and much-loved locals such as JM Coetzee, Paul Theroux, Nelson Mandela, Rian Malan, Mamphela Ramphele and Pieter-Dirk Uys.
