Having spent nearly a decade as a lecturer in English, History, Literature and Philosophy, Lela now enjoys working as a researcher. As well as a MA in Creative Writing, she also has a graduate degree in English with History. At college she studied English, Ancient History and Sociology. While doing so, she took a career skills test which revealed she should be a detective. Although she’s no Jessica Fletcher, she does have a deep passion for investigating so she instead pours her problem-solving instincts into the research process.
Lela has recently ghostwritten a health memoir on commission and is now researching a historical figure she stumbled upon during her wanderings through an archive. She has worked on numerous research projects in the area of heritgage, including researching and writing two books. She is experienced in using digital archives, record office databases, physical archives, newpapers, official documents, minute books, conducting oral history interviews, searching visual media, dating photographs, indexing and selecting material to create the most intriguing and entertaining narratives.
A recent project in which Lela was involved, was consulting Creative Waves on their history project Pop Up On the Prom, an exhibition on the history of a stretch of seafront in Sussex. She also researched all manner of curious subjects to write articles for publication in Ernest Journal (the publication for which she worked as Production Manager and Acting Features Editor). This included the 19th Century craze for seaweed collecting, inventions from the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the sea monsters of the Carta Marina. To read a sample of Making a Great Exhibition of Themselves please click here.
She is open to discussing project plans and how she might contribute to your ideas. This may include personal histories, memoirs, autobiographies, the history of specific organisations, charities, locations or groups. If you have a project in mind, whether or not you know where to begin, please get in touch.
Lela Tredwell 