Creative Writing and Publishing MA: Who teaches this course

• Staff teaching on this course

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences teaches this course. Students benefit from a lively study environment, thanks to the wide range of postgraduate courses on offer.

Programmes cover everything from English literature and music to human rights and politics.

The Faculty provides a vibrant and forward-thinking environment for study with:

• courses designed in collaboration with industry professionals – keeping you up to date with the latest developments;
• established connections with the London arts and media scene – with a range of guest speakers, professors and lecturers visiting the University; and
• committed and enthusiastic staff – many of whom are expert practitioners as well as leading academics and researchers.

The Faculty's combination of academics and practitioners makes it a unique environment in which to further your studies and your career.

Where is the Faculty based? Most students are based at the University's Penrhyn Road campus, with our music and education courses taught at the Kingston Hill campus.

Paul Bailey

Paul Bailey has been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize and won a clutch of other awards. His work focuses on the often grim lives of families and outcasts. His novels include At the Jerusalem; Peter Smart's Confessions; Gabriel's Lament; Sugar Cane; Kitty and Virgil; and Uncle Rudolf.

Non-fiction includes An English Madam - The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne; An Immaculate Mistake - Scenes from Childhood and Beyond; and Three Queer Lives - An Alternative Biography of Naomi Jacob, Fred Barnes and Arthur Marshall. He also edited the Oxford Book of London.

Paul has taught creative writing at the University of East Anglia and in Italy.

Adam Baron

Adam is a lecturer in creative writing and has written four crime novels, which have been translated into French and German and serialised on BBC Radio 4. He specialises in contemporary fiction and crime fiction.

Dr Scott Bradfield

Dr Scott Bradfield, formerly Professor of English at University of Connecticut, 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.

Siobhan Campbell

Siobhan Campbell is a poet and critic. She has worked in book publishing for many years as publishing manager and director of Wolfhound Press. Her collections of poetry are entitled The Permanent Wave and The Cold that Burns, both from Blackstaff Press, Belfast.

Siobhan's work is represented in many contemporary anthologies, including Making for Planet Alice (Bloodaxe) and The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (Norton). She has been writer-in-residence for the Airfield Trust, Dublin, where she founded the Airfield Readers and Writers Group. She is also on the Board of Kingston University Press.

Professor Norma Clarke

Professor Norma Clarke is not only a renowned scholar of 18th century literature, but also the author of a series of children's novels. Her expertise in the study of literature and her professional life as an author will form a key part of the teaching of this course.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk is the author of four novels and various works of non-fiction. Her 1993 debut novel Saving Agnes won her the Whitbread First Novel award. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her latest novels are Bradshaw Variations (2009) and Arlington Park (2006). 

Professor Vesna Goldsworthy

Professor Vesna Goldsworthy is the author of Inventing Ruritania, a groundbreaking study of representations of the Balkans, and the widely acclaimed Chernobyl Strawberries – A Memoir. Vesna has a background in the study of travel writing, 20th century fiction and popular culture.

Dr Eva Hoffman

Dr Eva Hoffman is an internationally renowned writer and academic. Born in Kraków, Poland she emigrated with her family immigrated to Canada in 1959. She studied at Rice University, Texas (English literature), the Yale School of Music, and Harvard University, where she received a PhD in literature. Awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Warwick in 2008 and formerly a member of the creating writing programme CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing Eva now lives in London.

Her most important publications include Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989), Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993), Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997), The Secret (2002), After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004), and Time (2009). She teaches on the MA course at Kingston, offering students the opportunity to study the personal essay as well as supervising MA and MFA dissertations.

Dr Meg Jensen

Dr Meg Jensen is a creative writer and academic specialising in contemporary British and American fiction and poetry; literary and cultural theory; and influence and intertextuality. She is author of The Open Book – Creative Misreading in the Works of Selected Modern Writers.

Meg completed her first novel in 2005, and is now working on a second. She writes poetry and drama, and has published academic work on Tolkien, Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Thomas Hardy. She is also the Director of the Centre for Life Narratives.

Dr Jane Jordan

Dr Jane Jordan is a specialist in Victorian writing and the author of biographies on Josephine Butler and Kittie O'Shea. Jane teaches the study of biography and draws on her knowledge of Victorian popular culture. 

Alexander Masters

Alexander Masters is the writer and illustrator of Stuart: A Life Backwards, the innovative and much acclaimed biography of Stuart Shorter. It traces in reverse order the life of a young man, somewhat disabled from birth, who became a criminal, mentally unstable and violent, living homeless on the streets of Cambridge. Alexander was inspired by Shorter himself to turn the conventional biographic form around.

The book won an Arts Council Writers' Award; the Guardian First Book Award; the Hawthornden Prize; the Samuel Johnson Prize; and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States. It was also shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 2005 in the biography category.

Alexander also wrote a screenplay adaptation, filmed in 2006 for the BBC and HBO, and broadcast in September 2007. That adaptation won the Royal Television Society Award in the Single Drama category and the Reims International Television award for the Best TV Screenplay.

In 2007, he collaborated with photographer Adrian Clarke on the book Gary's Friends, chronicling the lives of drug and alcohol abusers in the northeast of England. Alexander teaches a workshop on our MA course and supervises MA and MFA dissertations. He has just finished his second book.

Dr Paul Perry

Dr Paul Perry is the author and editor of a number of critically acclaimed books including The Drowning of the Saints, Goldsmith's Ghost, and The Orchid Keeper. His translations include 108 Moons: The Selected Poems of Jurga Ivanauskaite.

His most recent book of poetry The Last Falcon and Small Ordinance was published by the Dedalus Press in 2010 and described by Dermot Bolger in The Sunday Business Post as "the work of a singular imagination". Paul's awards include the Hennessy Prize for Irish Literature and The Listowel Prize for Poetry.

Winsome Pinnock

Winsome Pinnock's plays include The Wind of Change (Half Moon Theatre); Leave Taking (Royal National Theatre and Lyric Hammersmith, Studio); A Hero's Welcome, A Rock in Water and Talking in Tongues (all Royal Court Theatre Upstairs); Water and One Under (both for the Tricycle Theatre).

Radio plays include Her Father's Daughter; Water; Let Them Call It Jazz (adaptation of a Jean Rhys short story); and Something Borrowed (all BBC Radio 4). Contributions to television series include Chalk Face and Eastenders (both BBC) and the screenplay Bitter Harvest (co-written with Charles Pattinson for BBC 2).

Awards include the George Devine Award and the Carlton Television best play of the year award. Winsome was Senior Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. 

Dr Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson studied at the Universities of Oxford, where she won the Newdigate Prize, and Nijmegen, where she received a PhD in the philosophy of language.

Her 17 books include Rough Music, short-listed for the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes 2010, and A Century of Poetry Review (PBS Special Commendation, 2009). She has 11 books in translation, including Patuvachki Dnevnik, awarded the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia, 2004).

In 2009, she received a Cholmondeley Award and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. She has received writer's awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, and the Society of Authors, as well as the US Literary Review's Charles Angoff Award and a Hawthornden Fellowship; and has been shortlisted for the Forward single-poem prize and twice for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Fiona is the Editor of Poetry Review, the UK's oldest and most influential poetry journal, and contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Independent and the TLS.  A past judge of the Irish Times IMPAC and Independent Foreign Fiction Prizes, this year she is a judge for the Forward Prizes and Eric Gregory Awards. Music Lessons: the Newcastle Poetry Lectures and Percy Bysshe Shelley (in the Faber poet-to-poet series) are both published in May. Forthcoming from Chatto are Beyond the Lyric, (autumn 2012) a critical survey of contemporary British poetry, and her next collection, Coleshill (January 2013).

Dr Elif Şhafak

Dr Elif Şhafak (Safak) is an internationally-acclaimed writer and the bestselling woman-writer in Turkey, publishing novels and non-fiction written in Turkish as well as English.

She graduated in international relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey and holds a Master of Science degree in Gender and Women's Studies and a PhD from the Department of Political Science at the same university. She spent a year at Mount Holyoke Women's College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, United States, on a fellowship; served as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and on the faculty in the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. She has currently lives in London.

Her novels in English include The Saint of Incipient Insanities, The Flea Palace, The Gaze (translation of Mahrem), The Bastard of Istanbul, and in 2010 The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi, along with the non-fiction text Black Milk. Elif teaches a workshop on the MFA course at Kingston and supervises MA and MFA dissertations.

Dr Todd Swift

Dr Todd Swift 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. 

Dr Wendy Vaizey

Dr Wendy Vaizey is a fiction writer and former journalist for The Times.  She completed her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of East Angelia in 2010 and in 2011 was a recipient of a Faber Fellowship. She has recently completed her first novel.

Mark Barrowcliffe grew up in Coventry and studied at the University of Sussex. After working as a journalist and a stand-up comedian he first achieved success as part of the Lad Lit movement. He published The Elfish Gene, a memoir of growing up uncool and confused, and obsessed to acclaim, in 2007. His other works include Girlfriend 44 (2000), Infidelity for first-time fathers (2002), Lucky Dog (2004), Mr Wrong (2008) and, under Pen name MD Lachlan, Wolfsangel (2010). Mark supervises MA dissertations in addition to teaching workshops on comedy and ghost writing and conducting a short course at the University in the summer on the memoir.

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Liz Jensen spent two years as a journalist in the Far East before joining the BBC as a journalist, then producer. She subsequently moved to France where she worked as a sculptor and began her first novel, Egg Dancing. Back in London she wrote Ark Baby (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award); The Paper Eater; and War Crimes for the Home (longlisted for the Orange Prize and adapted for the stage). Her latest novel, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, was featured on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime and is being adapted for film, written and directed by Anthony Minghella.

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Dr Barrie Keeffe is an English dramatist and screenwriter, best-known for his screenplay for the 1981 film The Long Good Friday. His first television play, Substitute, was produced in 1972 and his first theatre play, Only a Game, in 1973, and in 1975 he became a full-time playwright after a career as journalist. He was writer-in-residence at the Shaw Theatre in 1977, resident playwright with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1978, and associate writer with the Theatre Royal Stratford East from 1986 to 1991. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Warwick. Some of his most noted works include the following theatre plays - Only a Game (1973), Gimme Shelter (1977), A Mad World My Masters (1977, 1984), Barbarians (1977), Sus (1979), Black Lear (1980), Better Times (1985), Not Fade Away (1990), The Long Good Friday (1997), Shadows on the Sun (2001), and Still Killing Time (2006). His television plays include Substitute (1972), Not Quite Cricket (1977), Champions (1978), Waterloo Sunset (1979) and King (1984); his films The Long Good Friday (1981) and Sus (2010); and his novels Gadabout (1969) and No Excuses (1983). Barrie provides extra lectures, workshops and tutorials for MA and MFA students and supervises MA dissertations.

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Hanif Kureishi is a multi-award-winning author of numerous novels, essays, stories and screenplays. His early work, the seminal My Beautiful Laundrette (1984), gained him an Oscar nomination, while The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel. His more recent works include Gabrielle's Gift (2001) and My Ear at His Heart (2004). His latest screenplay, Venus (2007), was released to critical acclaim in early 2007. Hanif's works have been translated into 36 languages.

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Mary Lawson is an acclaimed Canadian novelist now living in Kingston upon Thames. A graduate of McGill University with a psychology degree, she has published two best-selling novels set in Northern Ontario, Crow Lake, winner of the Books in Canada First Novel Award (2002) and the McKitterick Prize (2003), and The Other Side of the Bridge, which was long listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2006. Mary provides guest lectures for both undergraduate and postgraduate students and individual tutorials for postgraduate students. She is currently at work on her third novel.

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Andrea Stuart grew up in the Caribbean and the US. She has lived in Paris and now lives in London. She is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Showgirls, about Josephine Baker, published by Jonathan Cape in 1996 and Josephine: The Rose of Martinique, a biography of the Empress Josephine, published by Macmillan in 2003. She is co-editor of the Black Film Bulletin and Fiction Editor of Critical Quarterly. She is currently at work on a new biography for Faber and Faber. She provides extra seminars, lectures and tutorials for MA and MFA students and supervises MA dissertations.

Liz Berry was a recipient of the The Eric Gregory Award in 2009 for her first collection of poetry. The award given by the Society of Authors is awarded for the benefit and encouragement of young British poets who are under 30 at the time of submission. Liz will read from her poetry this year as a guest of the course as well as conduct tutorials and workshops for MA and MFA students. She will supervise a MA dissertation.

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Kayo Chingonyi is a published poet and writer, events promoter, workshop facilitator, music fanatic and all manner of other things including a blogger (The Train Set Lifestyle). Kayo will perform his poetry for students at Kingston as well as supervise a MA dissertation and conduct tutorials for MA students. He is also the popular Master of Ceremonies for the School of Humanities undergraduate Awards and Achievement Show.

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Clare Allan is the winner of the first Orange/Harpers short story prize. She published her first novel Poppy Shakespeare, an arresting account of madness set in a North London day hospital, with Bloomsbury in April 2006. The novel was longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the BT Mind Book of the Year Award in 2007. She is at work on her second novel. Clare provides additional workshops for MA and MFA students and will read from her work at Kingston this year. She will also supervise a MA dissertation.

Alison Baverstock

Alison Baverstock, the course leader, is a former publisher, who now writes about publishing, how to get published, and marketing within the book trade. 

Her How to Market Books, now in its fourth edition, is often referred to as the 'bible' of book marketing. Both this book and its companion volume Are Books Different? (both from Kogan Page) are used as the basis of publisher education worldwide (translated into ten languages with further editions under discussion).

Alison has also written widely about how to write and get published, and these titles reach a particularly large audience -  Is There a Book in You? and Marketing Your Book - An Author's Guide (both published by A&C Black) have been featured on Richard & Judy, BBC Breakfast and Woman's Hour. 

A regular commentator in the press on book-related issues, Alison has written for The Bookseller and Publishing News. She writes a monthly blog (Red Letter) for www.writersandartists.co.uk and has a regular column in Writer's Forum. She has contributed to the past five editions of The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook.  

Alison is a regular speaker at conferences for writers and publishers and at many literary festivals.  She has run many seminars for The Society of Authors on how authors can best work with agents and publishers, and trained generations of publishers to promote books and writing. In 2007 she received the prestigious Pandora Award, awarded annually to a woman who has made a lasting contribution to the publishing industry. 

Richard Cohen

Richard Cohen is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Kingston University. For over 25 years he held various posts in the publishing industry, including publishing director at Hodder and Stoughton and at Hutchinson. He also started up Richard Cohen Books, which won The Sunday Times Small Publisher of the Year award in 1998.

For two years he was programme director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, during which time it became the largest such festival in the world.

Richard is also the author of By the Sword, a history of gladiators, swashbucklers, samurai and Olympians. His next book, Chasing the Sun, a cultural and scientific history of the sun, is due out next year. He lives in New York with his wife, the literary agent Kathy Robins.

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Richard Duguid

A veteran of Kingston's popular Publishing masterclasses, Richard Duguid's expertise lies in the vital areas of copywriting, editing and proofreading. Richard has worked in this area of publishing for 15 years, joining the copy-editorial department of Penguin Books in 1986.

In addition to running the editorial processes module on the MA in Publishing, he remains editorial manager of Penguin Press.    

Mary Ann Kernan

Mary Ann Kernan is programme director of the MA in Publishing Studies at City University.  She was a commissioning editor in academic and professional publishing with highly regarded lists in geography, psychology and management. She went on to become a director of Methuen & Co Ltd and deputy publisher at Routledge.

Since then, Mary Ann has worked as a consultant in e-learning, publishing, training and product development. Mary Ann will be leading the module 'Publishing: The Structure of an Industry'.

Judith Watts

With 20 years' experience of the publishing industry behind her, Judith Watts has witnessed at first hand all the major market and structural upheavals of the past two decades.

Judith began her publishing career working for Blackwells Publishers and Booksellers in the late 1980s, before moving to Routledge, where she spent several years as a senior marketing manager, overseeing a team of 30 staff across a range of academic disciplines. She has since worked as a company director for Marketability UK, a company which trains industry professionals in how to target consumers, and project-managed the recent publication of Kingston University Press's Iris Murdoch Review.

Judith leads the 'Evolution of Publishing' module, and oversees the publication of Kingston's Ripple creative writing magazine.

You will have the opportunity to learn from a range of guest lecturers and masterclass speakers throughout the course. Recent contributors include:

• Peter Ashman, Publishing Director, British Medical Journal Group
• John Blake, Managing Director, John Blake Publishing
• Aimie Bush, Production, Random House
• Andrew Crofts, author of Ghostwriting and The Freelance Writer's Handbook
• Philip Downer, Front of Store and former CEO of Borders
• Ruani de Silva, Publicity Manager, Zed Books
• Richard Duguid, Editorial Manager, Penguin Press
• Liz Gooster, Editor-at-large, Kogan Page
• Clare Hodder, Rights Director, Palgrave Macmillan
• Patrick Keogh, Guardian Masterclasses
• Ziyad Marar, Global Publishing Director, Sage Publications
• Elaine McQuade, Marketing and Publicity Director, Oxford University Press Children's Books
• Tony Mulliken, Chairman, Midas PR
• Wendy Perriam, author of Broken Places and Tread Softly
• Jon Reed, Editor-in-Chief, Publishing Talk
• Nick Robinson, Sales Director, Vintage Books
• Diane Spivey, Rights Director, Little, Brown
• John B Thompson, Professor Sociology, University of Cambridge and author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century
• Natasha Waterson, Digital Media Producer, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
• Kate Wilson, Managing Director, Nosy Crow

Find out more about our masterclasses and our industry links.