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.Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. He studied at University College Dublin and lived in Barcelona between 1975 and 1978. Out of his experience in Barcelona he produced two books, the novel ‘The South’ (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and winner of the Irish Times/ Aer Lingus First Fiction Award) and ‘Homage to Barcelona’, both published in 1990.
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. Full biography
M.J. Hyland
M.J Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin. She studied English and law at the University of Melbourne and achieved an honours degree in both. How the Light Gets In, her first novel, was published in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2004), the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award (2004) and was equal winner of the Best Young Australian Novelist Award (2004). Hyland’s second novel, Carry Me Down, published in 2006, was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and won both the Hawthornden and Encore Prizes in 2007 and was also longlisted for The Orange Prize in 2007. Her third novel This is How, published in 2009, has received widespread critical acclaim. Full biography
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 Sunburst Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award. 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