NEWS New Faces

 

We are very excited to welcome new members to our editorial team! Please meet our new

Debut Journeys Editor, Mario Ambrosi and our Opening Lines Editor, Chip Colquhoun.

Mario Ambrosi 

Mario Ambrosi

Mario was a journalist for around 10 years before moving to a major older people’s charity where he's worked his way up to communications and marketing director.

He’s always been interested in the interconnections between young and old – and penned a song on that theme that got 300 older people to the top of the Amazon singles chart. More recently, and since becoming a dad, he uses any spare time he can get to hone his writing for children – particularly middle-grade.

A literature graduate, he studied writing for children with the Golden Egg Academy and has been long-listed by both The Times/Chicken House and the Bath Children’s Novel Award.

PR Week listed him in their guide to the “brightest and most influential PR professionals in Britain.”

He’d love to hear from SCBWI debut writers happy to feature in the Debut Journeys section of Words & Pictures. Follow him on Twitter.

Chip Colquhoun

Chip Colquhoun

Chip began writing before being taught how to write. The meaning of his three-year-old squiggle is long-forgotten, but there was clear punctuation including paragraphs. He had his first newspaper article published at the age of nine, and wrote numerous scripts – some of which were produced by his school to raise money for charities.

But that was all for fun. Chip became a professional storyteller in 2007, and has since performed in nine countries. He’s the face of the Oxford Reading Tree's Traditional Tales resources, wrote the EU's 2015 guidance on using stories in schools, has been a regular at Glastonbury Festival since 2016, and represented the Roald Dahl Story Company on ITV.

His writing career began with theatre scripts, five of which were nationally touring productions supported by Arts Council England. Then, in 2015, The History Press commissioned him to write Cambridgeshire Folk Tales for Children. This gave him the middle-grade writing bug, and he's since had a further 18 titles published. Seven of these include illustrations from the award-winning Korky Paul, with whom Chip co-produces the Fables & Fairy Tales series of books for Epic Tales. Last year he was made an Associate Artist for the National Centre for Writing.

He's excited to be joining the Words & Pictures team, and will be bringing you a new Opening Lines opportunity in March, June, and September.

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Stephanie Cotela is the Network News & Events Editor for Words & Pictures Magazine.