Olivia Gordon

e:olivia@oliviagordon.com

 A former staff features writer for Real, I am now a freelance journalist. I write about new social trends and the way we live, and cover everything you'd expect to find in general features pages and magazines, including women's issues, health, beauty, relationships, real life and travel. Mental health, crafts/knitting and weddings are three other (very disparate!) areas in which I specialise.

 I also undertake all kinds of commercial editorial work, from copywriting to editing to proofreading, in both the public and private sectors, for both small businesses and high-profile organisations like the NHS. Please click here for more information on my commercial editorial work.

JOURNALISM

As a journalist, I have done inhouse features and news shifts for publishing houses including Emap, Natmags, IPC Media, Hachette and VNU.

And I've written for many national newspapers and magazines, including:

The Observer/Guardian (Observer Woman, Observer Food Monthly, Observer Review, Observer news, G2, Society) 

The Telegraph (Sunday Telegraph Stella magazine; Seven arts and culture supplement; travel; features)

The Times (Sunday Times Style; T2)

The Independent

The Mail (You magazine; The Daily Mail's Femail & Good Health)

The Express (Sunday Express; Express Yourself)

The Evening Standard 

She

Red

Grazia

Cosmo Bride

Wired (UK)

Prima


First


Psychologies

Tatler 

NW (New Woman)

Shape

Essentials

Allaboutyou.com

The Knitter

TVHits!

Real People

Closer

Real

BMI Voyager

Woman's Own

The Bookseller

The Jewish Chronicle

The Australian

NHS.uk

Design Council Magazine

CAM (Cambridge Alumni Magazine)

Sweet magazine

PC World magazine

Ethos Journal

ichild.co.uk

Marie Claire (Italy)

VIVA (Dubai)

You magazine (South Africa)

Wish magazine (Australia)

 

TRAINING: Olivia and Johanna

Olivia and Johanna is the brainchild of two highly successful but also staggeringly friendly and genuinely nice freelance journalists - Olivia Gordon and Johanna Payton. Together we run masterclasses for PR professionals, charities, journalists and companies on how to work more effectively with the women's consumer press and successful freelance journalism. Please visit my Journalism and PR Training page  or our training blog for more details.

 

BOOKS

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.