Spectrum Writers London was founded in 2015, just as another big group known as the Cola Factory Writers disbanded. Many of our founding members came over from there, and continued running critique meetings using the Milford method.

We are a team of volunteer organisers with a variety of skills and interests; we split up event organising duties across our different activities, so there will always be an organiser at every event. You can find out more about the current team here.

We operate a hybrid model, primarily using Discord for our online activities and meeting in pubs and other public venues in London when in person. Check out our events listings and see when you can next join us!! If there are no future events listed, keep an eye out on the calendar for updates or sign up for our newsletter.

Yes! We do not ever want to paywall the group, as we know that writers at the beginning of their careers are often strapped for cash, and need all the support they can get. We cover the costs of running the group through selling tickets to special events, merchandise, and accepting one-off or monthly donations from our members.

We welcome members from outside London and even outside the UK, as a lot of what we do can be accessed online via Discord. All our events are listed in GMT timezones (GMT/UTC during the winter, and BST/GMT+1 during the summer), so if you are based outside the UK, please keep that in mind.

Not anymore, but we used to be listed on MeetUp as “London Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Group” from 2015 till September 2024. Unfortunately, due to a very steep price hike in the MeetUp organiser membership fees after the company’s latest acquisition, we terminated our membership and migrated to our own website instead.

Any other London writers’ groups listed on MeetUp are not directly affiliated with us and do not represent us, but we do occasionally work with them and promote each others’ events.

If you were part of the group before the move away from MeetUp, please join us again! We’d love to have you.

The best thing to do is to join the group and, once approved, hop onto our Discord server. We make new event announcements directly to our members there first (and they often fill up fast!), and then send out emails with our upcoming event listings to all our newsletter subscribers, so feel free to sign up for that.

You can also directly subscribe to our events calendar through your favourite app, but remember that you’ll have to register in advance for each event!

We have to manually approve accounts to make sure we don’t get spam or malicious people joining the website. Please be patient with our volunteer organisers as they check through everything and accept your application—it shouldn’t take more than 3 days at most.

If you haven’t heard back after this time, please query us using the form at the bottom of this page.

Please see our submissions eligibility criteria for details.

When new members attend two critique meetings and provide meaningful feedback to the authors being critiqued at each one, they become Full Members, gaining the eligibility to submit their own work for critique. It is the first step in further eligibility (to join the Novel Track, for example—see below), and can only be revoked upon repeated instances of abusive behaviour or undisclosed non-attendance of our core events.

The meaningful feedback part is important: showing up not having read the stories, or just saying “I didn’t like this”, isn’t really conducive to sharpening your critical reading skills and getting you to think about writing in a more craft-focused way. We have a guide in the Members Area on how to provide a good critique that can help you make a start.

We do not run a beta-reader matching service, or accept unsolicited manuscripts for feedback. Our group is a community, and we expect members to engage with the group by attending meetings and providing feedback to others before seeking feedback on their writing. Read more here.

Novel Track groups are small accountability/feedback groups for people working on long form projects. We open the Novel Track when we have enough new members to form new groups—usually once a year—and have eligibility rules in place to ensure everyone is committed and engaged.

So please join the main group first, take part in a few meetings, and after you’ve been critiqued at least once, check with one of the organisers on Discord directly for a status update on the Novel Track queue.

Update (January 2026): Applications are now open for eligible members! If you are a full member and have had your work critiqued in the last 12 months, you may head to the members area and fill out the form to express your interest.

While our members may be happy to workshop story developmental edits with you, most of us are not well versed in the script format and therefore may not have the level of knowledge required to provide useful feedback on a granular level, especially if you are looking to get your script produced on stage or the screen.

Our main focus is the published format—prose of all lengths from drabble to novel (including short stories, novelettes, and novellas), and the occasional poem—and we can give you solid advice on how to get pieces in those formats published in short fiction markets, or how to look for a publishing agent who works with novelists.

For script feedback, we recommend looking for groups focused on that format (such as Messy Writers, London Playwrights, London Screenwriting Group), or applying for a writers’ group through the Royal Court Theatre’s scheme. They will be a much better source of advice about what a good script should look like, and/or where to send it once you’re done writing it.

We do not accept unsolicited book promotions. If you are running an event, workshop, or festival and would like to offer our members a discount or free access, please contact our organising team through our contact form at the bottom of this page.

In short, no. We have a clearly outlined policy on this page with more information.

This is a non-negotiable, so if you are passionate about using generative AI, this group is not for you.