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Department of English & Creative Writing:
John Murray, Royal Literary Fellow

Want Help With Your Academic Writing?

John Murray
Royal Literary Fellow at Lancaster University 2009-10
Novelist and short story writer

'One of my favourite writers' - DJ Taylor, The Guardian
'One of the best comic writers we've got, and the only natural heir to Flann
O'Brien' - Jonathan Coe, The Observer

John Murray can help you to:

1. Improve your writing skills
2. Develop an argument
3. Give structure to your essays, reports and dissertations
4. Add flow and clarity to your writing
5. Tackle the nitty-gritty of punctuation, grammar, spelling, etc.

All students, all subjects

This is John's third year as RLF Fellow. Last year he gave a total of 140 tutorials to some 102 students, a great many of them from the English and Creative Writing Department.

John is in County B205 on Mondays and Tuesdays from 5 October onwards.  Contact him by email, phone, or in person, and arrange an initial short appointment.  Then you can book a longer appointment where you and John will discuss your writing in detail.  (Remember that John will always be reachable by email, but can only answer the phone or the door on Mondays and Tuesdays!)

Email:  j.r.murray@lancaster.ac.uk

Tel: 01524 (5)94875

Room: County B205

John Murray

John Murray was born in 1950 in Cumbria. He read Oriental Studies at Oxford and since then he has spent most of his life as a full time writer. He has published 7 novels and a collection of stories, Pleasure, and he won the Dylan Thomas Award for short stories in 1988. Since 1993 his novels have been in the vein of comic extravaganzas. Radio Activity(1993), subtitled A Cumbrian Tale in Five Emissions, was a Novel of the Year in the Spectator and the Independent. His 2003 novel, Jazz Etc (Flambard), was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His comic satire about the media, Murphy's Favourite Channels, was a Novel of the Week in the Daily Telegraph in November 2004. His most recent novel is The Legend of Liz and Joe (2009) which was reviewed very favourably in the Independent, Guardian and Independent on Sunday. In 1984 John founded the acclaimed fiction magazine Panurge which he and David Almond edited until 1996. Panurge hosted the Lancaster University Creative Writing Short Story Competition in one of its 1995 issues.

John has a passion for his native Cumbrian dialect and it appears for comic purposes in several of his novels.

All one to one meetings are entirely confidential and are independent of the university.