New Tutors for Lancaster's Distance Learning MA

Diran Adebayo

Diran Adebayo is an acclaimed novelist, short fiction writer and cultural critic best known for his picaresque takes on modern Britain, and his distinctive ways with language.  His 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.

As a critic, he's written extensively in the national press and appeared as a guest on shows such as 'Newsnight', 'This Week' and the 'Today' programme, tackling everything from cricket and race to politics and popular culture.

He is currently writing his third novel, The Ballad of Dizzy and Miss P, and a sports-based memoir. He is a member of the National Council of the Arts Council of England and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Visit Diran's own website.
 

Sarah Corbett

Sarah Corbett lives in Hebden Bridge, but she grew up in North Wales, ever an English outsider. She 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 - a collaboration with a film director that may extend to TV Drama. She nearly has a first draft of a children's novel, and has just started working on lieder with a young composer.

Sarah is in her last year of a PhD in Creative Writing at Manchester University where she is writing a verse novel (gothic-surreal, mystery-love story) that will be taking up most of her creative attention for the next twelve months. She comes to Lancaster University after five years teaching with The Open University on their distance learning Creative Writing courses.

Conor O'Callaghan

Conor O'Callaghan was born in Newry, Northern Ireland, in 1968. He grew up thirteen miles away, in Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland. To date he 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.

For three years he directed the annual Poetry Now, Ireland’s only international poetry festival. He has also taught in North America, as both 2004 Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies, Villanova University, Pennsylvania, and visiting poet at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, from 2005-7.

Tom Pow

Tom lives with his wife and two children in Dumfries, a historic town in the south west of Scotland. For most of his career he was a school teacher, with breaks for writing and for travel; but, from 1990 till July of this year, he worked for Glasgow University Dumfries, first as Head of Creative and Cultural Studies and latterly as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Storytelling. He still has a connection there as an Honorary Senior Research Fellow.

Tom 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 of 2009. Since 2007, he has been working on a project concerning dying villages in Europe (www.dyingvillages.com), funded by a Creative Scotland Award. He has also been on the trail of Thomas Watling, Dumfries Convict Forger and Australia's first professional artist. This work - a poetic biography - took Tom to Sydney a couple of years ago and will take him to Kolkata in early 2010. He is presently working with a film maker on a community project based at a village primary school outside Dumfries.  Visit Tom's own website.