Real Life & Community Writer
Ordinary people, extraordinary turns.
I am, by every honest account, unbearably nosy. I eavesdrop on buses. I read the postcards in charity shops (I have a small and completely indefensible collection). Give me a quiet street and within a week I will know whose marriage is in trouble and whose son has finally rung home. It is a character flaw I have somehow made a career out of. I write the slow-burn ones, the stories where the world settles a debt forty years late, and the person everybody overlooked turns out, in the end, to have been the whole point.
Jamie started on the local-news beat in London and drifted, happily, into human-interest and nostalgia writing. He helped start Real Heart Story, mostly, he claims, so he would have a proper excuse to keep being nosy.
Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, University of the Arts London (2020).
His early human-interest and nostalgia pieces picked up a bit of local recognition, and he still mentors younger writers coming up through community programmes.
Five-a-side football, hunting for records in charity shops, and a truly excessive amount of tea.
A stranger in black handed me a key at my mother's funeral and told me to use it before my brother found out. I wasn't ready for what it revealed.
Jamie Shaw
He fired me for leaving during my daughter's emergency surgery. Eighteen months later, he sat across from me asking for a job.
Jamie Shaw
Every morning I gave Walter a free breakfast while my regulars whispered. The day he stopped coming, a black car pulled up outside my café.
Jamie Shaw
A note appeared in my locker in 1985 when I needed it most. I kept it forty years, never knowing who wrote it. Then I read his obituary.
Jamie Shaw
My father cut me off for twenty years after I married against his wishes. When he was dying, I opened the drawer beside his bed.
Jamie Shaw
A parcel arrived at our little library with a book that was 47 years overdue. What was folded inside the back cover changed everything for one woman.
Jamie Shaw
He called it an eyesore and filed a complaint. He thought it was just an old woman who'd let her garden go wild. He could not have been more wrong.
Jamie Shaw