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In November 2025 the three Berlin-based writers Madeleine Watts, Vijay Khurana and Gabriel Flynn, all of whom have recently published novels (Elegy Southwest, Passenger Seat and Poor Ghost!), talked about their working practice during a live event at Lettrétage. The three of them are members of a small, long-running writing group that has become an essential part of their creative practice. Founded around a decade ago by Habib William Kherbek, the group now meets weekly online, with members spread across Berlin, New York, and Paris. What began as a space for sharing fiction has expanded to include non-fiction and translation, maintaining a rhythm of regular meetings and open discussion rather than formal written feedback. In this conversation, Watts, Khurana, and Flynn discuss how trust, consistency, and friendship sustain their work as individual writers; how deadlines and dialogue shape their drafts; and how the group offers a space apart from the noise of the literary establishment — a place to think only about the writing itself.
The three of you are members of a seven – person writing group. Could you tell us a bit about how it was founded and its main objectives?
Vijay: As far as I remember, it was started around ten years ago by the writer Habib William Kherbek, who later left and moved to London. Originally we met in-person in Berlin, but we now meet online and have had members based in New York and Paris. The objectives tend to vary based on what we’re all working on. We might submit something quite polished that we’re fine-tuning, or a rough first draft that we’re still working out how to define and delimit. Originally submissions were solely fiction, but now we also workshop non-fiction and even occasionally literary translation.
Madeleine: I would also add that we meet quite regularly, which I gather is often not the case with other writing groups. We tend to meet once a week at a set time (so right now I try to never plan anything else for Tuesdays at 8pm). Occasionally during the summer we might meet every fortnight, when a lot of people are travelling. But the frequency of meeting is quite important, it keeps your mind tuned to writing, and reminds you to write if you’ve been prioritizing other things. We don’t give written feedback either, which helps us keep up the frequency. There’s also no expectation to submit formal line edits or letters (as one would in a taught MFA workshop, for example). We just have a conversation, usually about the work of two people each week – we spend half an hour on one piece, and half an hour on the other.
Do you write collaboratively as well and if so, what does this process look like for you?
Gabriel: No! In so much as we collaborate, we do so by reading each other’s work and giving feedback. However, between sessions, we all return to being solitary writers working on our own individually conceived projects.
How do you decide who belongs, who participates, or who is outside the group’s scope?
Gabriel: The group is really a small, informal arrangement based on friendships. Several of us have got to know each other through the group, but in the first instance, everybody was a friend of somebody else’s. We have had the same seven members for several years now, so it’s been a while since we had to have a conversation about another member joining.
Madeleine: I think there’s also a lot of awareness and care put into anyone new who joins the group. Because we’ve been working together for so long, there’s a really strong sense of intimacy we have with the people in group – we know they’re going to be good, faithful readers of one another’s work, which makes it feel safe to bring often pretty messy, unformed work. Any time somebody new has joined over the years, there’s been a lot of forethought put into whether they’re the right fit for the group as a whole.
When you share drafts with each other, how do you decide that you’re ready to share something, and how do you manage the emotional vulnerability that comes with sharing something that is unfinished?
Vijay: We’re quite an intimate group, in the sense that we know each other and each other’s work quite well, and there’s a respect and trust that goes along with that. I find the best time to submit something is after I’ve worked out what I’m trying to do but before I’ve reached any kind of certainty about it. It’s a bit like mock-publishing: you get to find out how six different readers (whose tastes you’re familiar with) will react. But I’ve also used the deadline of a group submission to try to get new words on the page, which is also helpful because the reactions can help me figure out where I want to go. Six different perspectives can really help you orient yourself within a piece of work.
Gabriel: One of the most helpful things about belonging to a group such as ours is having regular deadlines. Generally, I would prefer not to share my work until it’s at a more developed stage, but having to submit work when it’s my turn forces me to write, which means my work has a better chance of reaching that more developed stage. I find that having to share my work before I feel quite ready helps me to be less protective of it. But for that, trusting the others is essential. They can look at one of your drafts and imagine what the finished version might look like, because they’ve seen the process before.
When collaborating or giving feedback, how do you negotiate boundaries around ideas, influence, and ownership (i.e. when a suggestion becomes part of someone’s text)?
Vijay: I’d say we try not to make suggestions in that sense. We focus on trying to understand what the writer is doing and helping them develop it in their own way, rather than suggesting what we would do if it were our piece. I think it’s implicit that the writer always owns their text, and that we all benefit from sharing and giving feedback.
Gabriel: I agree. I think a reading of the work is more helpful, one that identifies what the work is doing, how it’s doing it, where it’s succeeding and where it’s falling short of its own ambitions. I think when suggestions are made, they tend to be made as examples that illustrate a more abstract idea. They are more likely to be prefaced with a statement such as, “I’m not saying you should do X, but doing something like X would have the effect of…”
How do you see your work and your collaboration contributing to or intervening in broader conversations about the literary establishment, diversity, representation, and institutional critique?
Madeleine: I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of our writing group in quite that way. I’d say that most of us have some experience of the ‘literary establishment’ (across three or four different countries) and how alienating it can be, how it separates writers from the actual work they’re making, and how it can create artificial noise that will drive you crazy if you listen to it too long. Our writing group can act as insulation from that, a place where we get to think only about the actual writing, and the perfection of what we’re writing, unobserved by anybody but each other.
