Editorial Services

I offer writers professional editorial services aimed at improving their manuscripts and helping them prepare their books for submission to agents, publishers and—ultimately—reviewers.

I provide forthright reader’s reports on whole manuscripts as well as real-time developmental and line edits —“live edits” as I call them—via video calls and Google Docs.

I come to this work as the author of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda, and bring my experiences as a journalist, essayist, and book critic (see “Writing” for my pieces in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, New Lines, The Spectator, The Critic, and The Globe and Mail, among other outlets).

My sensibilities are both literary and political, and are rooted in my appreciation of writers like George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens, who operated in the overlapping territory between literature, culture, politics, and international relations.

When I have reviewed books for national publications, I have often wished I had been able to speak to the author of a work under review before they had gone to print rather than having to deliver my criticisms in a public forum. Writing can be isolating, and many projects go awry simply for lack of timely, critical outside commentary.

To propose a project for editorial assistance, please write to me with a brief description via the contact form.

Editorial Collaboration: The Ice Ship (2023-current)

In late 2022, I was approached by Neil Harrison, an accomplished photographer and book designer with a substantial body of work from his time aboard the Russian icebreaker Akademik Fyodorov on the 46th Russian Antarctic Expedition in 2001. Although decades had elapsed since his voyage, he had documented it meticulously through diary notes, photographs, and a personal archive of Russian and Soviet Antarctic souvenirs and ephemera. He had already completed a handsomely-designed prototype of the book with photographs, maps, and an accompanying text, but wanted an outside perspective and—in view of Russia’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine—some suggestions about how to contrast the relatively free and open Russian zeitgeist of the early 2000s with the darkness of the current one.

Our collaboration began with a detailed reader’s report I provided based on Neil’s prototype, and has continued with in-person and online critiques of his chapter revisions. According to Neil,

I approached Roland to help with a travel memoir: an illustrated account of journeying to Antarctica with the Russians. From the starting point of my original draft, he has helped transform the narrative into a much wider-ranging story that delves into my own relationship with Russia, Soviet history, and contemporary geopolitics. Roland has been invaluable in “drawing the story out” by questioning and challenging my experiences to distil them into a tightly edited and much more dramatic form. His knowledge and personal experience of Russia has been a vital resource. The process of writing with Roland has been comprehensive, a journey in itself.

To propose a project for editorial assistance, please write to me with a brief description via the contact form.