Ghostwriting

As a member of the leading ghostwriting organisation ‘The United Ghostwriters’, Simon is available for select ghostwriting projects.

Background

I have devoted most of my adult life to good writing and strong story-telling. I am an award-winning author and poet, who has also worked in radio and the theatre. And like many successful authors, I have helped others – through mentoring, creative writing classes, and stints as writing coach at three leading universities.

I have ghosted for Mike Gatting, the former England cricket captain, been praised by John Major, the former prime minister, for my definitive biography of W.G.Grace, and thanked by maverick multi-millionaire Felix Dennis, who, after amassing his fortune, turned himself into a best-selling, venue-filling poet. I was his editor and Felix was kind enough to acknowledge ‘the likes of Simon Rae do not grow on trees.’

I have also helped those less drawn to the limelight. Mary Ann Hooper wrote of her revised memoir: ‘It is fascinating to realise that all the constructive criticism has helped me tell the story without ever making me feel it was anything other than MY story’; while Hilary O’Shea, Senior Editor, Classics, at the Oxford University Press, observed: ‘Simon Rae has an eagle eye for what makes good literature across a wide range of genres.’

My years in radio – I wrote and presented Radio 4’s Poetry Please! for five years – mean that I am a sympathetic and experienced interviewer. As a biographer, I have the skills to impose structure on the myriad details of a fully-lived life – one reviewer commented: ‘Rae breathes such life into his facts that they fairly leap from the page’, while my five published novels display a strong interest in character, and a pacey narrative style. I love a good story – and the challenge of finding the right way of telling it.

My areas of interest include sport, politics, modern history, theatre and travel, and having worked with, and got to know, one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs of our time, I understand something of the roller-coaster pursuit of extreme wealth.