Lianda Tel
Novelist
About Lianda
Bio
Lianda Tel is a writer, avid traveler and a Masters student at Northeastern University London.
Lianda has previously worked in the entertainment business in Los Angeles and Amsterdam. She studied filmmaking and screenwriting in Los Angeles, ran a production company and worked at Paramount Studios on the launch of the Paramount+ platform.
Currently, she's working on her debut novel Ponderlust which combines her passions for travel and storytelling. In her Contemporary Creative Writing Master she's working on other creative ventures in short form or non-fiction.
Lianda has been invited to the Vermont Studio Center for a writing residency fellowship in January 2026 and is set to graduate from her Masters Program in the Summer of 2026.
Ponderlust
Lianda is working on her debut novel Ponderlust, a wry upmarket fiction novel set in adventurous Colombia. Anabel, the novel's heroine, faces a quarter-life crisis after discovering she didn’t, in fact, have life all figured out. She travels to Colombia to find some answers but quickly falls into the familiar backpacker tropes of partying too hard and following a boy to a town in the middle of nowhere. Even though El Carmen de Atrato is the place she grows the most, her mainly platonic relationship still falls apart, and she’s forced to continue her personal rediscovery back home and leave all her former ideologies behind.
Lianda is currently in the redrafting process and will soon be querying the novel to agents and publishers.
Who is she anyway?
- First of all, Lianda hates to write about herself in the third person. It makes her feel like Terry in Brooklyn-Nine-Nine.
- Lianda is obsessed with dogs, Golden Retrievers specifically. She dreams of owning her own one day and will name it Queso.
- Lianda loves travel, which comes to no surprise if you look at her Instagram. 99% of the profits of her first novel will go to discovering new destinations or revisiting Mexico for the 20th time.
- Lianda loves a good pub quiz. That doesn't mean she's any good at them. What she is good at is coming up with punny team names; the filthier the better.
- Reggaeton is Lianda's favorite music genre. She loves to dance her heart out to the barely understood Spanish lyrics of musical geniuses like Bad Bunny, Rosalia and Maluma.
- To say Lianda is a gym-rat is an overstatement, but if she doesn't hit the gym at least 3 times a week a mental breakdown will inevitably ensue.
- Food is Lianda's middle name (it's really Geertuida, don't tease her with it). She mostly loves to eat it, but does occasionally cook it as well. Tacos and sushi are her faves.