Kingston University London

Our links with professional authors provide a range of different voices and styles to broaden your experience of the creative process. The Creative Writing teaching team combines:

Academics

Kingston University academics have a range of relevant research specialisms and nationally-recognised records of publication. This ensures your teaching is kept cutting-edge. Find out more in the Research and Who teaches this course? sections.

Professional writers

Many of our staff are professional writers, often award-winners in their particular forms or genres. For example, the poet Jane Yeh has been nominated for both the Forward and Whitbread prizes. Read more in the Who teaches this course? section.

Visiting professors

Visiting professors include Peter Kemp, author and literary editor of the Sunday Times, and Richard Cohen, editor.

Guest speakers

You hear from guest speakers with expertise in publishing, including copy editors, producers, literary agents, reviewers and literary editors.

Visiting writers

Visiting writers, experts in the various specialist pathways, add another perspective to your studies. Past students have benefited from lectures by:

• novelist Beryl Bainbridge
• prize-winning novelist Rhidian Brook; and
• Will Self, novelist, columnist and short story writer.

Writers in residence
Our current writers in residence are:

• Paul Bailey
  Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of a clutch of other awards, Paul Bailey is a novelist, biographer, dramatist and essayist. He is an acute, sympathetic – and comic – observer of the often grim lives of families and outcasts. Paul has taught creative writing both at the University of East Anglia and in Italy.
  
  His novels include At the Jerusalem (1967), Peter Smart's Confessions (1977), Gabriel's Lament (1986), Sugar Cane (1993), Kitty and Virgil (1998) and the very favourably reviewed Uncle Ruldolf (2002).
  
  Non-fiction includes An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne (1982), An Immaculate Mistake: Scenes from Childhood and Beyond (1990) and Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Naomi Jacob, Fred Barnes and Arthur Marshall (2001). He also edited the Oxford Book of London (1995).

• Scott Bradfield
  Scott has been teaching literature, critical theory and creative writing at both graduate and undergraduate levels for over 20 years in the US, the UK and Germany.
  
  

  His novels, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in more than a dozen languages – most recently Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance and the forthcoming novel How She Was Saved. He has written screenplays for Sony, Working Title and Universal, and his films have been featured at Tribeca Film Festival and Sundance.

• Maggie Gee
  Maggie Gee is a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford and completed a PhD at what was then Wolverhampton Polytechnic. She has been a Writing Fellow at the University of EastAnglia and is currently a Teaching Fellow at Sussex and Fellow and Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature. Her fiction is often experimental or futuristic, and her novels vary widely.
  
  Her novels include Dying, in Other Words (1981), The Burning Book (1983), Grace (1989), Where are the Snows (1991), Lost Children (1994), The Ice People (1998), The White Family (2002) and The Flood (2004). She has also edited an anthology of writings against war.

• Liz Jensen
  Liz Jensen spent two years as a journalist in the Far East before joining the BBC, first as a journalist, then as a TV and radio producer. She then moved to France where she worked as a sculptor and began her first novel, Egg Dancing, which was published in 1995.
  
  Back in London she wrote Ark Baby (1998), which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award, The Paper Eater (2000) and War Crimes for the Home (2002), which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and has been adapted for the stage.
  
  Her latest novel, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, was published by Bloomsbury in June 2004, and featured on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. In 2008 it will be brought to the screen by Miramax, in a film written and directed by Anthony Minghella.

• Hanif Kureshi
  Hanif Kureshi is a multi-award winning author of numerous novels, essays, stories and screenplays. His early work includes the seminal My Beautiful Laundrette (1984), with the screenplay gaining him an Oscar nomination, and The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), for which he won the Whitbread First Novel Award.
  
  His more recent works include Gabrielle’s Gift (2001) and My Ear at His Heart (2004). His latest screenplay, Venus (2007), will be released in the UK later this year. His works have been translated into 36 languages.

• Todd Swift
  Todd is a graduate of the creative writing programmes at Concordia University (BA) and UEA (MA).  His recent book of critical essays on Anglo-Quebec poetry, Language Acts, co-edited with Jason Camlot, was a finalist for the 2007 Gabrielle Roy Prize.  He has edited many poetry anthologies, including Map-Makers' Colours: New Poets of Northern Ireland (1988); and 100 Poets Against The War (2003). 
  
  His poems have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Poetry London and Poetry Review.  His fifth collection is Seaway: New and Selected Poems from Salmon, Ireland (2008).  He has also written for television, with over 100 hours of produced work, for companies including Hanna-Barbera, HBO, Fox and Paramount.