15th January 2026 – Wylye Valley Writers

The readers at our 15th January 2026 meeting:

William read his short story Battle Done, in which a soldier mulls on his return home. The story won second prize in the Summer 2025 Warminster writing competition.
William spent his early childhood and schooling near Salisbury and has lived in Steeple Langford for the last twenty-nine years. He spent the best part of a decade as a student, but then had to do real work, firstly as an engineer and later as a management consultant.
William has always been fascinated by everything to do with space and has been a life-long science fiction fan. He created his first book at the age of eleven from newspaper reports about the Apollo ten mission, having heard that ‘The Eagle has landed’ late at night while on scout camp in Grovely Wood.
He has written a trilogy of novels about twelve people isolated together for ten years on a spacecraft as the first human voyage to another star system.
Work on his next novel has just commenced, centres on a story of a scientist who persuades a billionaire to fund a project to transform Venus into an Earth-like planet. It considers questions of human responsibility for the environment.

Philippa read an extract from her novelisation of her mother’s teenage years in New York, based on diaries. The extract concerned being forced to leave school at fourteen to help her family.
Philippa has lived lives in Ireland, England, Italy, Switzerland, spent time in France and Spain as well as Africa – north, south, east and west. She has now lived in Wilton for twenty-two years and counting; it’s the longest she has lived anywhere.
Philippa is semi-retired and worked in lots of different jobs. She has used her creative energy in astrology, tapestry weaving, holistic healing, contemporary dance, teaching English as a foreign language and recently, singing.
She had written short stories for years. Last year, she did a three-month writing course with Louise Voss to decide whether to become a writer of longer pieces. It was a yes.

Thomas read four of his poems. The first was Untitled, the second called Untitled – Terpsichore, The third Forty Lines, and the fourth Saturday Night Kilkenny’s. A member of the audience likened his poetry to early Dylan Thomas.
Thomas comes from Farnworth in North West England, and is currently residing in Hale in the New Forest.
He writes poetry and fiction and is enrolled on the creative writing diploma course at Oxford University.
His poetry engages closely with traditional poetic form, seeking first to understand traditional conventions before dismantling them with intent and precision in his own writing.
Thomas is currently undergoing a process of sustained study, drafting, and revision, developing a cohesive body of work with the aim of approaching publications in the summer.

Sheelagh read her short story Travails with a Kipper; a very amusing tale about not wanting to waste food, but trying to avoid lingering odors.
Sheelagh is a very ancient, retired teacher. She has always enjoyed writing but hasn’t got much imagination so prefers to write from real life. Since real life often turns out to have an amusing side, much of her writing reflects this.
While teaching in a small village school during the 1990s she started to keep a diary of daily incidents. After submitting one to the magazine Child Education, they commissioned her to write their monthly ‘humour column’ for 18 months. And they paid!
She subsequently gathered these articles together into a small, self-published book entitled Blue Class.
Sheelagh was a church organist and director of the very small, very elderly choir, between 1994 and 2020 and she also kept a diary about that. She preserved these articles in a book with the title, Sweet Singing in the Choir.
Today, her writing mainly consists of short pieces about day-to-day events.

Tom read his short story Rings which he wrote in 2019. It was first published in Wiltshire Life and included in the collection Best British Short Stories 2021. It was also being read in New York on the same day as Tom read it for us.
Tom Bromley is an author, editor, creative writing tutor, mentor and ghostwriter (not the scary kind). He is the author of a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction including novels, short stories, memoirs and general non-fiction. As a ghostwriter, he has written over twenty titles, mainly celebrity autobiographies, including prize-winners and international bestsellers. As an editor, he has worked on over 150 titles, again including prize-winners and bestsellers.
As a writing tutor and mentor, he has taught novel and non-fiction writing to tens of thousands of students around the world, with a number of his students going on to become prize-winning and bestselling authors.
He has hosted the Salisbury Writing Circle for the last ten years, interviewing over 100 guest authors, was the founding director of the Salisbury Literary Festival, writes a weekly column in the Salisbury Journal and plays double bass in local jazz band Centrepiece. He is the recipient of Whitefox’s Unsung Heroes of Publishing Award.
For more information visit www.tombromley.co.uk or email tom.bromley@virgin.net

Photographs on this page by John Bruce, lightanddarker.com