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Profiles of Our Current Creative Writing PhD Students

Masturah Alatas

I was born and raised in Singapore. Since 1992 I have been living in Macerata, a medieval hill town in central Italy where I teach English and translation at the local university. I will be working on a novel set in colonial and post-colonial Malaysia. It will explore the theme of cultural conflict around child raising. Dr Jo Baker is my supervisor.

Had I had not migrated to Italy and learnt Italian, I probably would have never discovered that literature about colonial Malaysia was not the sole dominion of Victorian writers such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Joseph Conrad. The Italians who visited and wrote about the country have just as significant a contribution to make to our understanding of the British colonial experience in Malaysia. Studying the two literary traditions together has opened up for me exciting prospects for creative adventure, in particular a new way of imagining post-colonial writing in English: one with a strong Italian connection.

I write in both English and Italian. I have published a fable entitled 'The Girl Who Made It Snow In Singapore' and several short stories in Italian. I have recently completed a biography/memoir of my late father, a Malaysian sociologist and author of 'The Myth of the Lazy Native'.

Tariq Mehmood Ali

My first novel, Hand on the Sun, was published in 1983, much of which was written in jail or else on bail, on charges of terrorism, during a case which was known as the Bradford 12. The novel focused on the issues faced by Asian youth of the 1970's.

My second novel, While There Is Light, was published at the end of 2003. This deals with some aspects of the case of the Bradford 12. It was meant to be part one of two. I have also published a number of illustrated books, as well as one novel, Courageous Ali and The Heartless King, for children.

I write in two languages. English and Pothowari, my mothertongue. This is also called Pahari and Punjabi. Until recently this was primarily a spoken language, one which since British colonial times has been discriminated against. I helped to bring this language into the written form, particularly in prose.

Muli Amaye

I completed my BA English Studies and went straight onto the MA Creative Writing (Novel), both at MMU. Taking two years out, I set up a writing partnership and facilitated and project-managed workshops and projects throughout Greater Manchester with various schools and community groups. Collaborating with my writing partner, I had a short play performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and wrote a play for the opening of the Blue Box Theatre in Manchester.

I began my PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster in January 2006 and have undertaken a novel that spans from the 30's and pre-independence Nigeria to current-day Manchester. This research has taken me from the National Archive in London to the Labour History Museum in Manchester; it includes oral accounts from Nigerian women who settled in Manchester in the '50's and '60's and those of family members who live in Sapele, Nigeria. The novel explores memory and consciousness and the effect of migration on second and third generations. Graham Mort is my supervisor.

Angela Barry

I was born, raised and now live in Bermuda, a very small island in the North Atlantic, beautiful, strange, rich in some ways, poor in others – not at all what it appears to be. It is also the setting of my creative writing project at Lancaster, a novel which will tap into the ancient magic of the island while telling a very contemporary story. My supervisors are George Green and Graham Mort with whom I look forward to working on what is my most ambitious project to date.

I have contributed short stories and non-fiction pieces to several journals, have published a collection of short stories and have had my first novel accepted for publication. My day job is, and has for many years been, a teacher of English at the Bermuda College.

Ian Chapman

I'm writing a novel, a Northumbrian Western. It's Mad-Max meets Get Carter. I'm one year into this (part-time) PhD and I'm on draft three with 80 000 words and all the scenes in place. I need to sort out several secondary characters, tighten the beginning and put more scenery in. George Green is my supervisor and I've been picking Lee Horsley's brain too. They've both been great.

I've written a play and short stories and stuff before but this is the best (and most enjoyable thing) I've ever done.

John Corless

I live and write in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. I completed an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster (part-time, distance learning,) in 2008 which I thoroughly enjoyed and I’m delighted to have been accepted onto the PhD programme.

I write poetry, drama and prose. My debut poetry collection Are you ready? was published by Salmon in summer 2009. I have had many stories, poems and other pieces published in magazines and collections over the past few years.

My PhD project is a novel set in a present day rundown monastery in an affluent part of Dublin where nine ageing nuns pray all day. One nun wants to gain control of the community and build a new monastery and build-up the order. Along the way she meets many obstacles. I’m looking forward to working with all of you as well as with my supervisor, Jo Baker, on the project.

The distance learning MA worked extremely well for me. The online conferences and the summer-school were some of the best experiences of my life. I’m hoping this forum will match my past experience of Lancaster. I’ll give it my best shot at any rate.

Christelle L. Del Prete

I am a native New Englander who was accepted to Lancaster University's eLearning Creative Writing PhD program in 2007. I currently teach freshman composition as a Visiting Lecturer at Bridgewater State College and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In addition to writing and teaching, I am active in dog rescue and advocacy. I also enjoy bicycling and yoga. My supervisors are George Green and Lee Horsley. I’m working on a novel about sisters and the consequences of telling the truth and not being believed. Essentially, two sisters will be thrown together on a journey and will have to work out their own demons--especially the one that has been haunting their relationship for decades.

Sarah Dobbs

I am currently in my third year of a PhD in Creative Writing, supervised by Graham Mort and Lee Horsley. I am interested in Reader Response Theory, the dialogue between author and reader and how both can construct and navigate the gaps in a text producing, potentially, an ever-changing variety of individual interpretations upon each active engagement with the text. As well as teaching on Part 1, I also teach Creative Writing for the Open University and recently won a Funds for Women Graduates grant for this year.

I have just acquired an agent for my PhD novel, Killing Daniel, and other work critiqued at Lancaster has been broadcast on the BBC, published in Enigma and shown as part of Measure's art installation with Conrad Shawcross. I also spoke at the inaugural Echoes of the Past Conference at Newcastle University, and my subsequent article 'Joining the Dots: drawing modern pictures of the past through post-1990s film and television remakes' has just been accepted for publication in their forthcoming special issue journal.

Before embarking upon the PhD I remember Graham Mort saying how difficult the process was, both emotionally and intellectually. At the time, I thought, But I can handle it! I'm still adamant about that but Graham wasn't wrong. The last two years have been incredibly challenging, but I feel that ultimately this is the process that will equip me for my future career, whether that's writer/academic or, most probable, a combination of both. There is a lot of collective experience in this department and people who want you to do well. If you can access that, apply yourself and are prepared to have every concept you hold true demolished and reconstructed, then you should definitely consider Lancaster.

Suzanne Gannon

I started my PhD in July 2008 under the supervision of George Green and Lee Horsley. My study is an attempt at a personal narrative, a memoir, exploring my experiences within the Hare Krishna movement from 1970–1990, including a few years before that as a hippy (or even a few events earlier in my life that might have bearing on subsequent actions) and a few years after as I was easing myself out of devotee association.

I am aiming to create a work that will be regarded as both a personal history as much as a piece of social history. The terrain of the Hare Krishna movement is quite a contested one: the current field of memoirs on this topic are either written by critical ex-devotees, with a zealous agenda of some sort of exposé or written by practising devotees who have a covert (or overt!) agenda of proselytisation or which are written to inspire existing devotees. I am uninterested in writing either a confessional or spiritual autobiography, and my narrative stance is that of neither critic nor apologist.

One of the areas I'm interested in is the blurred boundaries between memory and fiction, and so, whilst trying to ensure that my narrative is as true to my memory as possible, I intend to write dangerously close to my personal physic truth. Thus, this work may ostensibly end up being closer to a work of fiction in which my “character” plays a defining part.

Eamonn Griffin

I'm engaged in a prose project, a novel-length piece set in Restoration London with the provisional title "The Prospect Of This City". I'm under the supervision of George Green and Lee Horsley.

I'm a distance-learning part-time student, and an Open University kid, having previously done a BSc in Politics and Sociology and an MA in Popular Culture (my dissertation was on the applicability of genre theory to "Alien" and its sequels).  I'm interested in the interaction of theory and practice, and in the intersection points between creative expression, wider structural concerns and the political economy of the creative industries.

As far as writing goes, I've had some success in short fiction, and I've got more than one novel-length piece in stages of lack-of-completeness. During the day I teach at an FE college.

Rhiannon Hooson

I began my research in October 2005, with Graham Mort as my supervisor. Currently I intend for this to take the form of a collection of poetry built around a sequence of longer, linked pieces exploring ideas of simultaneous texts and polyphony, and ways of expressing certain elements of Structuralist theory through the poetic medium. I am interested in how language behaves under pressure and under threat, and have a specific interest in Welsh culture, mythology and language, which tends to permeate my work. I’ve studied at Lancaster for some years now, and am also working on editing a novel.

Melanie Graham

I am a poet from the mountains of Virginia, currently residing in Florida. I am working on a manuscript of poems concerning violence and women and couldn't be more excited to be working with Dr. Helen Farish. Some of the poets I love include Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Chris Abani, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Linda Pastan, Kim Addinizio, and anything by Margaret Atwood.

Kim Jensen

My name is Kim Jensen. I have been enrolled in the PhD program in Creative Writing since January 2009. I completed my BA at University of California, San Diego; and my MA at San Diego State University. My first novel, The Woman I Left Behind, was published three years ago, and a collection of my poems called Bread Alone was just published this year by Syracuse University Press.

I am associate professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County where I am also the founder and director of our community book program; each year we select a text, use the book in our various interdisciplinary classrooms, and organize scores of cultural, academic, and political events related to the themes of the book.

I also serve on the editorial board of The Baltimore Review, and I am also politically active, especially on issues related to Palestine and the Middle East. My daughter is studying Theatre as a freshman at the California Insitute of the Arts, and my son is in high school at the Baltimore School for the Arts. I am married to a Palestinian painter and teacher, Zahi Khamis (www.zahiart.com).

My ever-evolving project is a post 9-11 novel set in Oakland, California. The two main characters are Mounir, a Palestinian grocer who is a refugee from Beirut; and his wife Carmen-- a political asylee from Bogota, Colombia. After 9-11, federal agents use increasingly coercive methods to persuade Mounir to become their informant. They threaten to deport Carmen back to Colombia where she faces persecution and death threats. For all the outside stress and pressure, this will be more of a family drama than a political one. Literary fiction rather than a suspense thriller.

Susan Liddy

I'm Susan Liddy and have just started a PhD in Creative Writing (Scriptwriting) with Jayne Steel. I live and work in Limerick, Ireland, where I teach scriptwriting to undergraduate and postgraduate Media and Communciation students in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. My postgraduate study has ranged from a Graduate Diploma in Womens Studies to a reseach MA on women's magazines from the University of Limerick to, more recently, an MA in Scriptwriting from the National University of Ireland, Galway. When I finally stopped running away from creative writing, I felt an enormous relief: I was home! Over the last few years I have produced a few small television documentaries and written a feature length script, 'Curious' which has received development funding from the Irish Film Board. It is currently in further development with Blinder Films, Dublin. I'm both excited and nervous at the prospect of the work ahead but delighted to have this opportunity to immerse myself in a subject I find exhilarating! This screenplay I'm writing (working title 'Webcam Girls') follows the emotional and sexual journey of a young woman and her aunt, when they are thrown together unexpectedly.

Karen Lockney

I completed my MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster  and was delighted to be accepted as a PhD student, with Paul Farley as my supervisor, this is my fourth year, part time. I work as a senior lecturer at the University of Cumbria, in Carlisle and Lancaster where I teach secondary English PGCE and undergraduate literature and creative writing. I also teach creative writing for the Open University. I live in the Eden Valley in Cumbria with my husband, daughter and dog.

Obviously, with Paul as a supervisor, my PhD focus is poetry. I am interested in notions of borders, Englishness/Britishness and identity (as well as how this is manifested through poetic form). This year, the aim of the PhD is achieving a sharper focus (I hope) through linking issues surrounding my own writing to an analysis of the work of Edward Thomas, with specific reference to nationality and concepts of borders. This literary analysis will hopefully help to shape my reflective commentary as well has having an impact on my own poetry.

Jennifer Makumbi

I am a Ugandan student currently living in Manchester. For this study, I will be working on my second novel The Hamites, which explores notions of Curse, Transgression and Geneology. Tentatively, my reseach focuses on 'Imagining Africa away from Africa'. Graham Mort is my supevisor. My other research interests include African masculinities and feminisms, Postcolonial and African Imagination, Reception and Readerships in Africa and, African oral traditions.

Cath Nichols

I'm in my final year of a PhD looking at Poetry and Radio. I enjoy performance, and this 'out loud' aspect of poetry has led me to consider the possibilites of writing for radio. My portfolio is likely to be a sequence of poems, a script and / or recordings. I am aiming for a 50/50 split on the portfolio/thesis. My supervisor is Prof. Paul Farley.

I completed an MA at Lancaster in 2007. My first year of the PhD produced two characters exploring particular griefs through specific locations - New York and the north-west of England. I've also created a five minute radio script 'Frog Love' about a girl's unrequited love for a gay frog (!) 'Frog Love' was made and recorded on an Arvon course in 2008. My most recent work is around myth and mermaids - particularly the way that these hybrid creatures are permitted sad endings, in contrast to the usual happy-ever-after of most fairytales. My general themes, also present in earlier work, appear to be grief, lack of voice and hybridity/transformation. My poetry collection is My Glamorous Assistant (Headland, 2007), and my pamphlet, Tales of Boy Nancy (Driftwood, 2005).

I chose Lancaster because I was looking for a campus-based PhD in poetry with different opportunities to those offered in nearby Manchester and Liverpool. The opportunties have been fantastic: my supervisor is internationally renowned; I have read for the Wordsworth Trust in the Lakes; I have worked on projects with the city's litfest and been published by its imprint Flax. I've also gained teaching experience here with a bursary that offsets my fees. I receive additional financial support from the university's college funds, the Peel Award and the Alumni Award.

Ren Powell

I am a member of The Norwegian Author's Union and have published two full-length collections of poetry, two chapbooks and nine books of translation. My work has been translated and published in French, Norwegian, Croatian, Basque and Spanish; staged in the US, Norway and Canada.

I helped to establish, and currently work for the International Cities of Refuge Network. My exposure to various aesthetic traditions through our journal, and my difficulties in evaluating the quality of Arab or African poetry etc., formed the basis for my PhD topic. I will be exploring how exposure to (what I perceive to be) radically different poetry aesthetics affects my own writing and reading.

Joanne Reardon

I’m in my final year as a part-time PhD student under the supervision of George Green and Dr Lee Horsley. I’ve written a crime novel which started out as an idea for a series of short stories but has now become a longer piece involving two interlinking voices with their own individual story to tell. I am interested in the importance of voice in crime fiction and the template of the hero’s journey which governs the structure of most detective fiction. As I have a detective in my novel, this will be the focus of my reflective thesis.

I did my MA in Creative Writing at UEA and have had work produced on BBC Radio as well as published in several anthologies.  Before embarking on the PhD I worked at the Bush and Royal National Theatres as well as in radio for the BBC as a producer of new writing and hope to bring my experience of this to the eventual reflection on my own work. I am currently an Associate Lecturer at the Open University.

Catherine Robinson

In almost thirty years of teaching, I have watched pupils longing for the truth of a story. Truth adds weight and value. Fiction embodies truths deeper than the literal and factual, but such truths often seem less satisfying. Finding a collection of compelling letters in the Stonyhurst archive has impelled me to paddle on that boundary between fact and fiction, in the hope of clarifying my thoughts.
I have always earned my money by teaching, and played at writing. To my name I have an out-of-print children's novel, an out-of-date textbook for English teachers, and the experience of co-writing for the Walt Disney Company - which I know is nothing to brag about. My best stuff is still in the spare room drawer.

Lisa Samson

I have just started my PhD in creative Writing under the supervision of Sara Maitland and Graham Mort. I live in Harrogate and I teach Creative Writing and Academic Writing at Leeds Metropolitan University. Lancaster University was where I did my B.A in English and Italian, so I'm delighted to be back here, albeit only remotely.

Within the first week of commencing my research, I discovered that two novels have been published, one in September and another in July, on the very topic I was embarking on: the construction of the Italian Chapel on Orkney during World War II. After reading one of the novels and investigating the other, I decided to abandon this topic for now, and am starting an entirely new novel about the life of a medieval woman living in Swaledale, Yorkshire. This was a story I first conceived of when I was walking the Corpse Way in Swaledale earlier this year, researching for a piece of literary non-fiction that I have subsequently published an anthology entitled A Wilder Vein. The story begins when the woman is a girl and her father is the Keeper of the Dead House, the half way resting place for the corpses while their pallbearers sought sustenance at the nearest inn. Little has been written about Swaledale during this period so research will be challenging but I'm already excited at the prospect.

Colin Sargent

I am a part-time distance-learning PhD student in creative writing. With Dr. Green as my supervisor, I am working on a new novel about what it's like to be the tail end of a trend, marooned by society. My novel Museum of Human Beings (www.museumofhumanbeings.com) has had two hardcover editions and a paperback version. My play "100 Percent American Girl" was an Acorn Playwrights' Festival winner, and my screenplay Montebello Ice is under option at Gideon Films.

I am the author of three books of poetry, two published with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. I have a B.S. in English from the United States Naval Academy, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine, and am an individual artist fellowship winner in literature from the Maine Commission for the Arts as well as a member of the board of trustees for the literacy organization Maine Reads. I am the founding editor and publisher of Portland Magazine (www.portlandmagazine.com), and live on the coast of Maine, USA.

Barb Schoichet

I hold a B.A. in Journalism from Stephens College in Missouri and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and I've explored writing from all angles professionally. This means I have taught journalism and creative writing at the college level, I have worked in publicity at Paramount Pictures, I have been a book editor for a publishing company, and I have been a literary agent.

Publications include a nonfiction book entitled The New Single Woman: Discovering a Life of Her Own, two children's workbooks, and numerous short stories.

I began my PhD in Creative Writing this January 2009 and my advisors are Dr. Graham Mort and Dr. Lee Horsley. My research work involves a comparison of Sylvia Plath's work and Virginia Woolf's work with my own in terms of how depression is a catalyst to writing. The difference is that they succumbed to their depression, and I have learned to thrive in spite of mine. My goal is to teach young people that they too can write their way out of less than favorable environments and states of depression, and be not only the happier for it, but also the wiser.

My creative work is a novel entitled Bug Juice, which is based on a 21-day motorcycle trek I took across the United States (from New York to Los Angeles) alone at the age of 50. It was my way of jump-starting my life after a series of falls -- loss of job, lover and mother all within a 6-month period. As it turns out, those "falls" have allowed me to rise to greater heights, and that's what my novel and PhD at Lancaster University will address.

Monica Spence

I live on Long Island, about twenty miles from New York City, and I've has been writing since high school, back when rocks were soft.

With an MA and BA in Theater (Costume), I worked for six years as a costume designer then spent many years
(read: decades) as a clothing and swimwear designer in New York City. In 2004, I began a new career as a professor in the Fashion Design Department at the Art Institute of New York City where I teach Fashion History, Textiles, and various technical classes.

In 2005 I returned to school for a Masters in Writing Popular Fiction. My thesis was about the Medici family and set in Sixteenth Century Florence.

I am an assistant editor for The Complete Anachronist and I review novels for the Historical Novel Society. When I am not reading, writing, or researching, you can find me in my sewing room making Sixteenth Century garments. My thesis novel for Lancaster is about Sofonisba Anguissola, the first internationally recognized woman painter of the Renaissance.

Harry Whitehead

I am working on a PhD in creative writing. My subject (in fact, better put, the 'object of my studies') is the life of the shaman Quesalid, a First Peoples Canadian who lived between 1854 and 1932 on the British Columbia coast, and his relationship with the anthropologist Franz Boas. In fact, Quesalid was far from the man the anthropological literature painted him as being. His father was English and his mother a princess from an Alaskan tribal people. Through his life he was a translator, a shaman, a chieftain, a hunter, a trader for the Hudson's Bay Company. He was a foreman in the white logging and canning factories which grew up at that time. Yet also, he was an ethnographer, a photographer, a filmmaker with Edward Curtis, a collector of material culture to the extent that he is responsible for as much as 80% of the world's museums artifacts from that region. He was even tried for cannibalism. He lived in the margins between categories, a man who came out of the forest of "primitivism" and into the Citadel of Reason, only to discover that the supernatural and the irrational exist equally in all worlds.

His story is one of multiple narratives, alternative versions of stories which, over time, become literary and intellectual myth, liminal cultural spaces and academic subversions. My PhD questions both how he became written and how I might come to write him in all his multiplicities. As Foucault said of himself, "don't ask me who I am and don't expect me to remain the same." How to marry the constant and absolute flux of a person's life, with the myth of a reified, Enlightenment linearity that biography seems to require? And how to recognize that any biographical subject remains no more than the manifestation of it's author, without so undermining the validity of the text as to place it outside of recognizable literary canon or genre, and thus unmarketable?

During the day, I work as a location manager in film, television and tv advertizing. I also write fiction now and then (take a look on my blogpage - http://harrythemule.wordpress.com).

Kim Wiltshire

After graduating from an MA in Creative Writing at Manchestser Metropolitan University in 2003, where I started writing my first novel, I felt that there was something missing academically in my writing. I wanted to explore issues around gender, and through discussion with my supervisors I have developed a study in contemporary texts exploring the use of the interim form of masculinity that I am terming 'the Loser'. Using a mixture of theory and creativity, I am forming a picture of early millennium masculinity in Western society.

Work outside Lancaster University includes: several pieces of short fiction published in magazines and short story anthologies ; commissions from Burnley Youth Theatre (to write two plays for young people, with 'Polarised' recently being adapted into film for schools) and Activ8 at Bolton Octagon Theatre; Community Art work in Manchester around diversity and health issues, and work as Community Arts Project Manager for Lime Arts and Health;  scriptwriting for internet TV station 'Lets Go Global'. In 2008 I was one of six writers mentored by Charlotte Keatley through North West Playwrights to write my first full length stage play, Joy With Child. This play has had two showcases to date, and I am currently working on my second play, Manchester Calling. I am a Creative Writing lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at MMU Cheshire and also for the Open University, and I throughout 2009 and 2010 I will be the writer on the Transitions Cystic Fibrosis project at Lime Arts and Health, funded by Children in Need. 

Abigail Zammit

I am currently living in Malta and I started a part-time, distance-learning PhD in Creative Writing in May 2009. My area of interest is poetry, with a special focus on contemporary foreign poets writing in English.

I have published one poetry collection entitled Voices from the Land of Trees (Smokestack, 2007) and have had poems published in 'Orbis', 'Markings', 'Libertine', 'Aesthetica', 'Freefall' and several online journals, including 'Ink, Sweat and Tears'. I am currently writing a collection of poetry about the representation and recreation of memory, with the sea acting as leitmotiv.

Read about some of our past Creative Writing PhD students.