Academic Director, The Writing School
Programme Leader, MA in Creative Writing
Twentieth-century and contemporary fiction; creative writing; the history of biography.
BA, MA, PGCE (Leicester), Ph.D (Warwick). Honorary lecturer in English at King's College in the University of Aberdeen (2000-2003). Visiting lecturer at Trondheim University, Norway (2002). Teaching in the English Department and Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University since September 2003.
Contemporary fiction and literary biography; Anthony Burgess; British writers of the 1930s, especially W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh; Anglo-French literary relations and translation.
Winner of the Portico Prize for The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (Picador, 2005).
Other publications include chapters in Il Mondo Distopico di Anthony Burgess, ed. by Flavio Gregori (Turin: Lindau, 2004), Portraits of the Artist in A Clockwork Orange, ed. by Emmanuel Vernadakis and Graham Woodroffe (University of Angers Press, 2004), Anthony Burgess, Autobiographer, ed. by Graham Woodroffe (Angers, 2006) and long essays on Peter Ackroyd, William Boyd, J. M. Coetzee and A.L. Kennedy for the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
As a journalist, I have written for the Guardian, Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, Literary Review, Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement, Boston Globe and the Daily Telegraph.
I am currently researching another biography.