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Publications by Lancaster University Creative Writing Staff

Creative Writing at Lancaster is taught by a distinguished group of prize-winning writers.  We are delighted to announce that in 2009-10 we are being joined by Tom Pow, Sarah Corbett, Conor O'Callaghan and Diran Adebayo.  These appointments increase our departmental strength to fourteen full- and part-time members of staff who amongst them publish in a wide range of genres: poetry, novels, short stories, drama, children's fiction and young adult fiction, poetic biography, screen plays and radio plays, creative non-fiction, travel books, comic memoirs.

A feature of Lancaster English & Creative Writing is the bringing together of critical and creative writers, as in the ‘Narrating the North’ and ‘Wordsworth’s “Second Selves”’ events.  The Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research hosts a number of projects which have a strong international dimension and which also bring together the critical and the creative, including the Moving Manchester project, the Crossing Borders mentoring scheme for African writers and Radiophonics.

Student Publications. Writers who have studied in Lancaster's MA and PhD programmes have published over fifty books in recent years: our Student Publications page gives you a sampling of the wide range of work they have brought out and provides links to the excellent reviews that many of them have received.

Go to our Staff Pages for further information on individual members of staff.

Diran Adebayo

Diran Adebayo's debut novel, Some Kind of Black, was one of the first to articulate a British-African perspective, and was hailed as breaking new ground for the 'London  novel'. It won him numerous awards, including the Writers Guild of Great Britain's New Writer of the Year Award, the 1996 Saga Prize, a Betty Trask Award, and The Authors' Club's 'Best First Novel' award. It was also long listed for the Booker Prize, serialised on radio and is now a Virago Modern Classic. His second novel, the mutli-layered, neo-noir fable My Once Upon a Time was also widely praised. In 2004 he co-edited 'New Writing 12', the British Council's annual anthology of British and Commonwealth literature. Diran has presented and written stories and films for television and radio, including the 2005 documentary 'Out of Africa' for BBC2. He is currently writing his third novel, The Ballad of Dizzy and Miss P, and a sports-based memoir.  Visit Diran's own website.

Jo Baker

Jo Baker's first novel, Offcomer, was published by William Heinemann in 2001. Her second novel was The Mermaid’s Child (Heinemann, 2004) and Jo's most recent novel, The Telling, was published in by Portobello Books in June 2008.  Amongst the things reviews of The Telling say: “Baker’s deft pacing pays spooky dividends.” John O’Connell, Time Out; "The great strength of the novel is that you are equally concerned with both sets of characters, and their stories. Baker’s spare, visual prose is a treat to read." Daily Mail; "a knock-out ghost story", The Telegraph.  The Telling will be a featured title in the January/ February issue of New Books Magazine.  Read the whole of Sinclair McKay's review, "A Haunting with Emotion at its Core," in The Telegraph.

Sarah Corbett

Sarah Corbett has published three collections of poetry with Seren Books: The Red Wardrobe (1998), The Witch Bag (2002 )and Other Beasts (2008). The Red Wardrobe won an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot and Forward prizes. She has written several short films and a full length script, and is working on a children's novel.

Jane Draycott

Jane Draycott’s poetry collections include No Theatre (Smith/Doorstop, 1997), Christina the Astonishing (Two Rivers Press, 1998, with Peter Hay and Lesley Saunders), Prince Rupert's Drop (Carcanet, 1999) and Tideway (Two Rivers Press, 2002).  Her collection The Night Tree was published by Carcanet in 2004. She has been nominated 3 times for the Forward Prize.  Over, Jane Draycott's third book, was published by Oxford Poets in April 2009.  Click here for Sean O'Brien's review, "Immerse Yourself", The Guardian, 25 April 2009.  Visit Jane’s own website.

Helen Farish

Helen Farish's debut collection of poems, Intimates, was published by Cape in 2005 and won the 2005 Forward best first collection prize. Read the Guardian review of Intimates.

Paul Farley

Paul Farley's books include The Boy From the Chemist Is Here to See You (Picador, 1998), The Ice Age (Picador, 2002), Tramp in Flames (Picador, 2006) and Distant Voices, Still Lives (British Film Institute, 2006).  Paul's own website is currently under redevelopment, but a summary of his work and numerous prizes (including the Forward Prize and the Whitbread) can be found if you visit his Poetry Archive page.  In 2009 Paul was awarded two major literary prizes: the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

George Green

George Green has written numerous short stories but more recently has published longer fiction: Hound was published by Transworld in 2003, and the follow-up, Hawk, in 2005. His book Writing a Novel and Getting Published came out in 2007.  Visit George's own website.

Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland's 1978 novel, Daughter of Jerusalem (Blond and Briggs), won the Somerset Maugham Award.  Her other publications include Telling Tales (Journeyman Press, 1983), Weddings and Funerals (Brilliance Books, 1984, with Aileen la Tourette), Virgin Territory (Michael Joseph 1984), A Book of Spells (Michael Joseph, 1987), Arky Types (Methuen, 1987, with Michelene Wandor), Three Times Table (Chatto, 1990), Home Truths (Chatto, 1993), Women Fly When Men Aren’t Watching (Virago, 1993), Angel and Me (Cassells, 1995), Angel Maker (Henry Holt, 1996) and Brittle Joys (Virago 1999). Her recent publications include On Becoming a Fairy Godmother (Maia Press, 2003), Far North and Other Dark Tales (Maia Press, 2008) and The Book of Silence (Granta, 2008).

Brian McCabe

Brian McCabe has published three collections of poetry: Spring’s Witch (Mariscat Press, 1984), One Atom to Another (Polygon, 1987) and Body Parts (Canongate, 1999). He also writes fiction, including three collections of short stories, The Lipstick Circus (Mainstream, 1985), In a Dark Room with a Stranger (Penguin, 1995) and A Date With My Wife (Canongate, 2001), and a novel, The Other McCoy (Mainstream 1990; Penguin 1991). Selected Stories was published by Argyll in 2004. He won the Canongate Prize in 2000.

Graham Mort

Graham Mort has published short stories in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.  He has published eight books of poetry:  A Country On Fire (Littlewood Press, 1986), A Halifax Cider Jar (Yorkshire Art Circus, 1987), Into The Ashes (Littlewood Press, 1988), Sky Burial (Dangaroo Press, 1989), Snow From The North (Dangaroo Press, 1992), Circular Breathing (Dangaroo Press, 1997), A Night On The Lash (Seren, 2004) and Visibility (Seren, 2007). He has won numerous prizes for both his poetry and his short fiction.  See Graham's Writer's Gallery to read some of his poems and visit his website. Read The Guardian review of Visibility. He was winner of the Bridport International Short Story Prize in 2007 and brought out Touch, a full-length short-story collection, with Seren in 2010.

Conor O'Callaghan

Conor O'Callaghan has published three original collections of poetry: The History of Rain (1993), shortlisted for the Forward 'Best First Collection' Prize and winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award; Seatown (1999); and Fiction (2005), a PBS Recommendation and shortlisted for The Irish Times Prize.  Apart from poetry, he has written extensively on sport. Red Mist — Roy Keane and Ireland’s World Cup Civil War, a comic prose memoir of the public furore surrounding Ireland’s involvement in the 2002 World Cup, appeared from Bloomsbury in 2004. A film adaptation, part documentary and part animation, was screened last year on Setanta TV.

Tom Pow

Tom Pow is primarily a poet, but he has also written radio plays, picture books, young adult novels and a travel book about Peru. His last single collection - Dear Alice - Narratives of Madness (Salt, 2008) - won the poetry category of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Scottish Book of the Year Award last year. In the Becoming, New and Selected Poems (Polygon) was published in the summer 2009. It draws on his work over the last two decades, from Rough Seas (1987) to Dear Alice. Since 2007, he has been working on a project concerning dying villages in Europe, funded by a Creative Scotland Award. He has also been working on a poetic biography of Thomas Watling, Dumfries Convict Forger and Australia's first professional artist. Visit Tom's own website.

Jayne Steel

Jayne Steel’s screenplays include ‘Mavis and the Mermaid’ (shown at 2000 Cannes Film Festival and 2000 Edinburgh Film Festival) and ‘Frozen’ (RS Productions, 2004, premiered at London Film Festival).  She has also edited Wordsmithery: The Writer's Craft and Practice (London: Palgrave, 2006) and Demons, Hamlets and Femmes Fatales: Representations of the Troubles is forthcoming in 2007.  Click here to read more about Jayne’s films.

Michelene Wandor

Michelene Wandor's books of poetry include Upbeat (Journeyman Press, 1981), Gardens of Eden Revisited (Five Leaves, 1999), Musica Transalpina (Arc, 2006: Poetry Book Society Recommendation), and The Music of the Prophets (Arc, 2006). She writes short stories - collected in Arky Types (Methuen, 1987, with Sara Maitland), Guests in the Body (Virago, 1986) and False Relations (Five Leaves, 2004) - and drama.  Her plays include Five Plays (Journeyman Press, 1984), The Wandering Jew (Methuen, 1987) and Wanted (Playbooks, 1988).  She has also written a number of critical studies: Carry On, Understudies (Routledge, 1986); Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender (Routledge, 2001); The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (Palgrave, 2008), and numerous radio plays, dramatisations and features for BBC radio and television. Click here to visit Michelene's own website.