United Kingdom
In both professional and personal contexts, I am always proud to describe myself as a writer. It's what I love doing most, and I feel privileged to make my living from it.
During my three years in content writing, I have worked as part of the editorial team for one of the world's largest social media companies, as the sole content marketeer for a recruitment firm specialising in advanced technologies, and as a writer/editor for the digital team of a prominent UK charity. I have also committed a lot of my personal time to honing my craft as a fiction writer.
These varied experiences and opportunities have allowed me to write a broad range of content. I have tried to provide a snapshot of this range below, but I am always happy to provide more examples of my work upon request.
You can also find my personal writings and online CV via my blog (linked below).
AKA Emlyn (Em) Black
This is a personal piece written under a pseudonym for The Metro. I wanted to highlight the struggles of queer people who are stuck at home during lockdown, and my own gratitude for having distance from homophobic relatives.
This is a listicle I wrote based on my personal experiences with self-care, and how it is so often misportrayed in the media.
This piece was ghostwritten for Elliott Browne, a recruitment company specialising in IT. As I did not have a background in the industry, I committed a lot of time to researching and understanding their audience.
This piece is from my personal blog. I wanted to explore the political ideologies linked to our beliefs about the pandemic, and why people are likely to toe the party line on such issues.
This was one of the last pieces I wrote at VT. I was very proud of it because, even though it is not a topic that many would normally engage with, it got more than 7,000 shares on social media.
Here is an interview I conducted with David, a man with secondary breast cancer.
This is an example of a piece I wrote based on personal research (i.e. not something that was in the news cycle at the time). It has been shared over 20,000 times and, at the time I left VT, had achieved over a million clicks.
For this piece, I interviewed four women about their experiences with breast cancer and motherhood. All of Breast Cancer Now's 'personal stories' content is in first person, so I subsequently transcribed and edited the interviews to fit the in-house style.
In December 2019, a designer I met through previous work commissioned me to write the copy for an ad campaign pitch. Our ideas made it to the final two of an initial nine contenders, but unfortunately were not selected in the end. Here is a small selection of our work.