Page 26 - ELG1807 July Issue 459

FEATURE .

The twists and

turns of fate

Former English language teacher Liz Huntley tells

EL Gazette how ‘chance meetings and serendipity’
led her to an unusual literary collaboration with a
French student she taught in the 1980s

ack in the 1980s I was teaching and it seemed very much an unattainable remember the Gazette’s editor Melanie
English in one of the many language dream. Butler asking me at the time, ‘Do you think
schools that occupied the upper However, I was always on the look-out it will change your life?’
Bfloors of the buildings in and It certainly did change my life, but not in
around Oxford Street in central London. My ambitions to quite the way I expected.
Mine was above a bookshop in a side- become a writer were a While at the conference, I met
street and specialised in one-to-one short a few people from Longman (now
courses for overseas business people. distant memory when, Pearson Education) who told me about
Hundreds of managers, executives, opportunities in their company for people
entrepreneurs and engineers passed through quite out of the blue, with an ELT background – not as a writer
that warren of tiny rooms, clutching their I was contacted by a or as editor, as I would have expected, but
copies of The World of Business or Financial in sales.
English. Frenchman Sales, I asked myself? That had certainly
There were plenty of nice people, clever not been part of my plan.
people, people who could easily have for opportunities, and one day I spotted But I was young and very happy to
become friends in other circumstances, but a competition in – of all places – the consider a new direction.
as is the way with students on short courses, EFL Gazette (as the EL Gazette was then I took the job – and I took to sales like a
I had forgotten most of them before they known). duck to water.
had boarded the plane home. They were looking for short stories I spent nineteen years at Longman/
At the time, like many other EFL specially written for learners of English. I Pearson moving up through the ranks,
teachers I knew, I harboured ambitions to entered – and what do you know? – I won! from UK sales rep to a managerial role
be a writer. The prize was, to my mind, astonishing: specialising in central Europe.
But the road to becoming a successful an all-expenses-paid trip to Texas to attend I then moved to National Geographic
novelist was just as rocky then as it is now the Tesol Conference in San Antonio. I Learning, where I am lucky enough to do a
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