Since leaving Brighton College, Lola Savage (Fe. 2017-22) has travelled through Southeast Asia, graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in English Literature with Creative Writing, and begun to develop a clearer idea of where she wants her writing to take her.
When she arrived at Leeds, Lola knew that writing mattered to her but was less certain about what she wanted to do with it. Over the course of her degree, her interests expanded beyond literature to include women’s lives, politics, fashion, beauty, media and contemporary culture.
Those interests now come together in her Substack, where she writes about subjects ranging from books and politics to fashion, beauty and the ways women are represented in public life. Rather than working within a fixed brief however, she uses the platform to explore ideas that have caught her attention and, in the process, to develop her own voice.
Lola’s time at Leeds also gave her an insight into the work behind publishing. She was involved with Tenter Hook, the university’s creative writing magazine, and became interested not only in writing but in how publications find and build an audience, develop an identity and use social media to engage readers.
More recently, Lola has completed the Raptor Academy Programme, gaining experience of the marketing and creative industries through workshops, mentoring and industry insight. The experience helped connect some of the interests she had been developing separately - writing, creativity, audiences, media and the commercial side of publishing.
Lola’s longer-term ambition is to create a magazine of her own. The idea is still at an early stage, but she envisages a publication that brings together politics, women’s lives, literature, culture, fashion and personal writing, reflecting the ways these subjects intersect in contemporary life. She does not have a fixed five-year plan - and is not particularly sure she wants one - so, for now, she is concentrating on her writing, exploring the publishing world and seeing where those interests take her.
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Lola’s latest Substack ‘Cool Enough to Care’ explores the vulnerability of wanting something before it exists, why she has decided to stop waiting for the "right time", and what it means to care enough about an idea to finally begin.