Word Sauce

Sophie Nicholls is a poet and a teacher and researcher in the field of creative writing for personal development, health and well-being. She is the recipient of an Arvon Jerwood Poetry Award and was the first person to gain a doctorate in the unique Creative Writing and Personal Development programme at the University of Sussex.

Sophie’s poems are published in national magazines and she is currently preparing her first collection.

She teaches creative writing at the University of Leeds and facilitates workshops for groups and organisations throughout the UK.

Sophie is a registered hypnotherapist with the General Hypnotherapy Register and works in private practice and with groups and organisations, combining hypnotherapeutic and creative techniques.

Sophie’s work with the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture has been featured in the national media. She is the founder of the online creative writing community for writers in exile, Lots of Big Ideas (LOBI).

Sophie has always been a compulsive scribbler and, as a child, she was a keen entrant of writing competitions, collecting some unusual prizes along the way. For her poem, ‘Why I Like Being a Brownie,’ she won 348 books; for her short story for the Woodland Trust she was given her own cherry tree; and for her win in the Post Office Letter-Writing Competition she got to try on Charlotte Bronte’s clothes. (They were very tiny.)

Whilst still at school, she wrote articles for the Yorkshire Post (who never paid her any money) and short stories for Just Seventeen and Mizz magazines (who paid her enough to buy a very nice bike).

After gaining a First Class MA (Hons.) degree in English Language from the University of Edinburgh, Sophie went on to work for Reuters, the international news agency, as a training consultant. It was here that she first began to explore the connection between her interest in writing and language and her enjoyment of helping people to develop personally and professionally.

She gained a DPhil for her research at the University of Sussex, which explored the psychology and neuroscience of creative writing for health and well-being. Her growing understanding of the connections between mind and body and the influence of meditation and mindfulness on health, happiness and creativity, led her to train as a clinical hypnotherapist.

Her special interests are the treatment of anxiety, stress and sleep problems, problems with self-image and body-image and helping individuals, teams and organisations to (re)discover their creative potential, increase their productivity and make work fun.