I write, and work as an editor, mentor and senior arts administrator in the literature and new writing sectors in the UK and the US. Organisations I have worked for as an employee and on a free-lance basis include: the University of East Anglia, the National Centre for Writing, LiteratureWorks, the Arts Council, the Arvon Foundation, the BBC, Manhattan Theatre Club, Channel Four, Self (Condé Nast), among others. I have written drama, short stories, novels, blogs and magazine features. I have designed and run creative writing workshops. I have undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in literature and journalism from Vassar University (New York), University College (Cardiff); and an MA from the University of East Anglia (Norwich) in ‘Writing the Modern World, 20th C Fiction Studies.’
I have established and sat on boards of not-for-profit organisations.
I am an accredited coach for writers through a training programme developed by Relational Dynamics Coaching and run by the National Organisation for Writers in Education (NAWE) in partnership with the Arvon Foundation.
I am an editor for the Paranda Network, run by Untold Narratives, an initiative to develop the creative writing of Afghan women writers.
I provide mentoring services through the National Centre for Writing.
A Perfect Mother - A Novel
“A Perfect Mother is a highly ambitious novel of ideas and a powerfully involving drama.’ - Derek Johns, author of Ariel: a literary life of Jan Morris
A bracing, hypnotic story of mid-life crisis about the complexities of love, relationship and legacy.
During a visit to Trieste in Northern Italy to research his long lost great-grandfather, Jacob meets Charlotte and Jane, and the three are forced to confront their individual and shared histories. Their sense of themselves is challenged and they must piece together a future none of them saw coming.
‘Ms Skala conveys the shadowed charm of these story-haunted stones. Her Trieste is never an abstraction, but it becomes a potent metaphor for the mask of beauty that violence may wear.’ - The Economist
My next novel, The First of All Pleasures, is a historical fiction set in 18th C Paris.