I started working on the idea of my first novel in Eva's workshops, which will be published soon. Later, she helped me with the manuscript as my mentor. I learned a lot from her about how to build up a character, how to find individual voices, and how to create an exciting plot. I really enjoyed working together. It was truly inspiring.

I have many reasons to be grateful to Eva. On the one hand, through her workshops and support, she has shown me the herstory of writing lived and experienced by women. That herstory offers possibilities, models and roots. On the other hand, the workshop and the occasions that grew out of it created a supportive and sustaining community. Thirdly, it helped me personally: I received thorough and rich feedback and dedicated edits to my texts. What I learned from the tidying up and the revision process is reflected in my writing. Not only was I able to refine the story structure and make it more accessible, but the clarity of the dialogue, the pace and the transparency of the often overblown sentences improved. In short, I came to Éva's workshop because I was interested in feminist crime fiction as a reader. Since then, I have won several competitions and published several short stories in prestigious volumes.

As an experienced journalist, I was used to writing a lot, but it didn’t seem easy to switch to another kind of text. Attending Eva’s workshops, I got all the tools and confidence I needed. The safe environment of the lessons urged all of us to share our work, therefore, we could learn from each other too. I am sure that I wouldn’t have finished my first book which will be published this year, without those experiences and the first manuscript assessment Eva did for me.

In the beginning I choose Éva, because of her interest field in women’s writing and asked her for personal consultation. I wanted to write a novel that could maybe be published one day. We have had a few sessions first, that helped me enormously to have the motivation to start the process and then I was also able to finish it within 2 years’ time. I then asked Éva again to do a manuscript assessment and a structural editing. I am still working on the book with her help and hopefully the story might reach more people one day as well. For me personally the most important thing was, that Éva helped me to believe that I have the right to write. As a Hungarian woman doing a lot of unpaid care work and two other paid jobs and therefore having no time plus having a trauma based low self-esteem I really-really needed to acknowledge that I am “allowed” to write. Even though I have been pretty much writing my whole life: scientific studies, a journal, poetry and a shorter novel as well, I still had to work on my belief system about writing and writers. She helped me a lot with that. She is also wonderfully talented in helping to find your voice, it’s rhythm and then also to express it in an enjoyable way by giving attention for example to the different points of view, the characters’ consistency or the dialogue’s layout. I am very grateful to Éva and I highly recommend her if you need to believe more in yourself or you just need a little push or a professional structural editing!