London Author Anastasia Dubinina Turns Book Event into Pop-Up World-Building Workshop
Speculative-fiction author Anastasia Dubinina transformed the Royal Festival Hall’s Level 2 foyer for a focused, London-centric world-building masterclass.
Originally advertised as a talk titled “Building Worlds Beyond the Known”, the session evolved into a practical workshop in which Dubinina demonstrated step-by-step how she constructed the setting of her 2023 novel Shattered Horizons of Tarveran.
Working with slide decks and printed map excerpts, the author outlined three core components of her process:
1. Civic Backstory – drafting a timeline of political and economic events that never appears on the page but shapes every street corner in the narrative;
2. Spatial Logic vs. Corporate Ambition – deciding where high-rise finance districts meet decaying freight yards, then analyzing how that border influences character motives;
3. Physics Under Stress – introducing dimensional rifts only after social structures are in place, ensuring that the anomaly feels disruptive rather than decorative.
Attendees were invited to submit questions in real time, turning the evening into an interactive blueprint for creators across literature, game design and screenwriting. The workshop over-ran its scheduled 90 minutes on Sunday, as participants requested additional examples of “narrative cartography” and practical exercises they could replicate.
Dubinina confirmed that the positive response has accelerated plans for a sequence of small, hands-on workshops covering advanced topics such as cultural logic, moral geography and sustaining tension across multi-arc story worlds.
Dates and registration details will be posted later this month in the Events section of her website: https://writeranastasiadubinina.com. A written recap of the Royal Festival Hall session is already available at https://writeranastasiadubinina.com/when-a-room-becomes-a-workshop-field-notes-from-the-first-tarveran-salon-writer-anastasia-dubinina.
The author’s credentials continue to expand. During the last twelve months her work has won a Creativitys UK Award (April 2025) and a Stein Arts Award.
