Teaching Staff
All classes and workshops are led by our teaching staff, a team of award-winning writers who, between them, have published more than two-dozen critically-acclaimed books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction.Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England, and adopted by Pentecostal parents who brought her up in the nearby mill-town of Accrington. After reading English at Oxford University she wrote her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, when she was 23. It was published a year later in 1985. Since then she has published more than a dozen books including, most recently, the memoir Why be happy when you could be normal? and The Daylight Gate, and has won various awards around the world for her fiction and adaptations, including the Whitbread Prize, UK, and the Prix d'argent, Cannes Film Festival.
In 2006 Jeanette Winterson was awarded an OBE for services to literature. She writes regularly for various UK newspapers, especially The Times and The Guardian. She was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester in September 2012.
Ian McGuire
Ian McGuire is one of the co-directors of the Centre for New Writing. He teaches courses on fiction writing, narrative form and contemporary literature. Ian is both a fiction writer and a literary critic. He has published short stories in The Paris Review, The Chicago Review and most recently, in the Manchester-based arts journal Corridor 8. His first novel Incredible Bodies, described by The Times as "Lucky Jim for the twenty-first century," was published by Bloomsbury in 2006. His critical interests focus primarily on the varieties of American realist fiction and he is currently at work on a critical project on the American novelist and short story writer Richard Ford the first part of which is forthcoming in The Mississippi Quarterly. Full biography
John McAuliffe
John McAuliffe was born in 1973 and grew up in Listowel, Co Kerry and now lives in Manchester. He won the RTE Poet of the Future award in 2000 and received a major Arts Council Bursary for first book A BETTER LIFE, which was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2002; NEXT DOOR was published in 2007 and The Gallery Press also publish his third collection, OF ALL PLACES, which is a PBS Recommendation for Autumn 2011. Full biography
Vona Groarke
Vona Groarke’s five award-winning poetry collections are published in Ireland by The Gallery Press, and in the U.S. by Wake Forest University Press. They include Shale, Other People’s Houses, Flight (which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and won the Michael Hartnett Award), Juniper Street and, most recently Spindrift, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2009 and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Prize in 2010. Recently, her poems have been published in the Edinburgh Review, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Kenyon Review, Poetry Review and Poetry London.
Two poems, 'Purism' and 'The Family Photograph' have appeared on the iPhone app, PoemFlow, and her work has been recently featured on BBC Radio 4, and on the Poetry Daily website. Her sixth collection, X, will be published in early 2014. Full biography
M.J. Hyland
M.J Hyland is an ex-lawyer and the author of three multi-award-winning novels: How the Light Gets In (2004), Carry Me Down (2006) and This is How (2009). Carry Me Down (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize & won both the Hawthornden Prize and The Encore Prize. M.J Hyland has twice been longlisted for The Orange Prize (2004 & 2009), the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2004 & 2007) and This is How (2009) was longlisted for the Dublin International IMPAC prize. M.J Hyland is a lecturer in Creative Writing in The Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester where she has run fiction workshops alongside Martin Amis (2007-2010), Colm Tóibín (2010-2011) and Jeanette Winterson (2013-present). M.J Hyland runs regular Fiction Masterclasses in The Guardian Masterclass Programme, has twice been shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Prize (2011 & 2012) and she publishes in The Guardian 'How to Write' series as well as the The Financial Times, the LRB, Granta and elsewhere. M.J Hyland is also co-founder of The Hyland & Byrne Editing Firm. For more information, see: www.editingfirm.com www.mjhyland.com
Geoff Ryman
Canadian author Geoff Ryman has won 14 awards for his stories and ten books, many of which are science fiction. His novel Air (2005), won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the James W Tiptree Memorial Award, the Canadian Sunburst Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award. In 2012 his novelette ‘What We Found’ won the Nebula Award in its category and his volume of short stories Paradise Tales won the Canadian Sunburst Award. Much of his work is based on travels to Cambodia such as ‘The Unconquered Country’ (1986), winner of the World Fantasy Award and British Science Fiction Association Award. His novel The King's Last Song (2006) was set both in the Angkor Wat era and the time after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. His other mainstream fiction includes Was (1992), a novel about the American West viewed through the history of The Wizard of Oz. His hypertext web novel 253: a novel for the Internet in Seven Cars and a Crash, won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award for best novel not published in hardback. In 2011, he won the Faculty Students’ Teaching Award for the School of Arts History and Culture. Full biography
Kaye Mitchell
Kaye Mitchell completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2004. She taught for several years at the University of Westminster before joining Manchester in 2007. Full biography