Tutors and Contact Information

MLitt Programme Convener:

Michael Schmidt
5 University Gardens, Room 401, tel. 330 6877; e-mail: M.Schmidt@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Programme Administrators:

Wendy Burt and Nikki Axford
6 University Gardens Room 302, tel. 330 8538; e-mail: Seslladmin@arts.gla.ac.uk

Enquiries about the course should be addressed to Nikki Axford (Monday, Tuesday) or Wendy Burt (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday)

Course Tutors

• Laura Marney 6 University Gardens, Room 401. Tel: 0141 330 8567, e-mail: L.Marney@arts.gla.ac.uk
• Willy Maley 4 University Gardens, Room 201. Tel: 0141 330 2559, e-mail: W.Maley@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
• Rob Maslen 4 University Gardens, Room 408. Tel: 0141 330 5663, e-mail: R.Maslen@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
• Kei Miller 6 University Gardens, Room 402. Tel: 0141 330 6877, e-mail: K.Miller@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
• Andrew Radford 5 University Gardens, Room 309. Tel: 0141 330 2133, e-mail: A.Radford@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
• Zoe Strachan 6 University Gardens, Room 401. Tel: 0141 330 8567, e-mail: Z.Strachan@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
• Elizabeth Reeder 6 University Gardens, Room 404. Tel: 0141 330 6449, e-mail: E. Reeder@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Associated Staff

• John Coyle
• Jane Goldman
• Alan Riach

Michael Schmidt is Professor of Poetry and Convener of the M Litt in Creative Writing. Born in Mexico in 1947, he studied at Harvard and Wadham College, Oxford. He is editorial and managing director of Carcanet (www.carcanet.co.uk), one of the leading British literary presses, and editor of PN Review (www.pnreview.co.uk), the journal now in its thirty-fifth year, which is edited from the Edwin Morgan Writing Centre. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association. He has written novels, books of poems, and has translated from Nahuatl and from Spanish. As a literary historian he has written Lives of the Poets (1999), Lives of the Ancient Poets (2004) and the ongoing series The Story of Poetry. He is currently writing Lives of the Novelists. He has compiled introductory anthologies of new poets' work, educational anthologies, and The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English.

Laura Marney was born in Glasgow and gained an MLitt in Creative Writing from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. Many of her short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies or broadcast on radio. She has recently returned from living in Barcelona. Her first novel No Wonder I Take A Drink was published in June 2004 by Transworld under the Black Swan imprint. Her second novel Nobody Loves A Ginger Baby was published in August 2005. Her third novel entitled Only Strange People Go To Church was published in June 2006. Laura is on sabbatical for Term 1 of 2007-08 working on her fourth novel.

Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He read English at the University of the West Indies and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Snow Monkey, Caribbean Beat and Obsydian III. His first collection of short fiction, The Fear of Stones, was short-listed in 2007 for the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize. His first poetry collection, Kingdom of Empty Bellies, was published in March 2006 by Heaventree Press. He is also the editor of Carcanet's New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology. He has been a visiting writer at York University in Canada, the Department of Library Services in the British Virgin Islands and a Vera Ruben Fellow at Yaddo.

Zoe Strachan was born in 1975 and grew up in Kilmarnock. She gained an MLitt in Creative Writing from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde in 1999 and is the award-winning author of Negative Space and Spin Cycle (both Picador). Zoë also writes short stories, essays, journalism and pieces for radio, and has most recently been published in New Writing 15 (British Council/Granta, 2007), Bordercrossing Berlin (Germany, 2007), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (EUP, 2007) and The Antigonish Review (Canada, 2006). In autumn 2006 she was UNESCO City of Literature writer-in-residence at the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. She has taught on the Creative Writing Programme since 2003, although last year she was on study leave, which she spent mostly in Germany working on her third novel, Play Dead. You can find out more at www.zoestrachan.com

Willy Maley has published widely on English Renaissance Literature, from Spenser to Milton, and on aspects of early modern and modern Scottish and Irish culture, from James Joyce to Alasdair Gray. Although chiefly a critic and editor, Willy has a number of plays to his name, including the prison dramas No Mean Fighter (Edinburgh Fringe First Winner 1992), Dirt Enters At The Heart (1993), and Doing Bird (1995); two historical dramas, From the Calton to Catalonia (1990) and Gallowglass (1991); and three Glasgow comedies, The Furst Fit (1989), In-Laws and Outlaws (1991), and The Lions of Lisbon (1992).

Rob Maslen has taught at the university since 1992, and on the Creative Writing Programme since 2000. His particular interests are in fantastic fiction of all kinds and in theatre, but he also enjoys poetry and other forms of prose - including the kind that accompanies the pictures in graphic novels.

Elizabeth Reeder is currently completing a novel and her final year of a PhD in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. She graduated BA Hons, Summa Cum Laude from Kenyon College, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and has a MSc in Modernism, Gender and Writing from University of Edinburgh. Her fiction has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies, and her BBC Radio 4 broadcasts include a Women's Hour Serial, stories, and an abridgment of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. She received Scottish Arts Council bursaries in 2001 and 2006, and was the Writing Fellow for the North East of Glasgow 2002-2004. She has particular interests in contemporary fiction and creative non-fiction, and in using virtual learning environments to enhance how we learn and communicate, both through distance learning courses and by augmenting campus-based courses.

Associated Staff:

John Coyle is Head of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is interested in Modernist and postmodernist literature and culture from an international perspective, and has published on a range of writers including John Ruskin, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and Don DeLillo. He is currently working on a book about Anglophone responses to Proust.

Jane Goldman joined the department at Glasgow in 2007. She researches and publishes on Modernist writings, British, American and European. She is particularly interested in Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Nathanael West, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Kurt Schwitters and other avant-garde poets, but she also takes pleasure in most poetry, and has a taste for inter-artistic analogy. She is also a textual editor. She writes poetry, and recently came second in the English Association Fellows Poetry Prize Competition. She is interested in the development of Creative Writing in English studies in relation to critical practice and literary theory.

Tom Leonard is one of Scotland's leading poets and essayists, whose work repeatedly addresses the politics of language and power in Britain, and has ranged in form from pamphlet protests against military engagements, to experiments in concrete and sound poetry. Professor Leonard shared the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award in 1984 for his influential collection Intimate Voices, a breakthrough volume for poetry in Scots, opening the doors of language, class and culture. It was republished in 2003. Leonard's 1990 anthology Radical Renfrew was hailed by The Herald as "the most significant event in Scottish poetry for a very long time", and gives voice to a forgotten tradition of radical verse, brought to light through detailed archival work. Leonard's account of the life and art of James Thomson broke new ground in biography and criticism, and exemplifies Leonard's intimate engagement with other artists as a writer responding to writers. access to the silence (poems 1984-2004) was published in June 2004.
Tom will be working with PhD students. He will be accessible to other students of Creative Writing by arrangement.

Alan Riach is a poet and Head of the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. His fourth book of poems, Clearances, was co-published by the Scottish Cultural Press and Hazard Press, New Zealand, in 2001. Other books of poetry include First & Last Songs (Chapman Books/Auckland University Press, 1995) and This Folding Map (Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, 1990). He is the General Editor of the 20-volume Carcanet Press Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid and the co-editor of Scotlands: Poets and the Nation (Carcanet, 2004). His radio series The Good of the Arts, first broadcast in New Zealand 2001, may be visited at http://www.southwest.org.nz/ . Alan was formerly Associate Professor of English and Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato (New Zealand, where he lived for fourteen years).