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
I am a journalism trainer for Journalism.co.uk. My co-trainer Johanna Payton and I run an acclaimed one-day course for journalists on finding and placing real life stories and case studies. Please click here for details of the next Journalism.co.uk real life journalism course, in central London on 29 July 2009.
I do PR training for individual companies, and am a PR trainer for 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'm training PRs on the Nationals, Women and health and Phone pitching workshops.
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.
