Melissa Bailey

I am writing a novel, called Wiggletrace, which explores the settler/migrant experience through the lens of England and Australia. A wiggle trace displays sound wave reflections from deep within the earth, which reveals patterns and stories across the earth and throughout time, even when the events which cause them are long passed. The novel has several narrative threads. One is a conventional narrative, following a young man who moves for economic reasons in the 1850 s from the north of England to the gold rush of Australia. Then there are the stories of his descendants – two sisters who work in the shipping and oil industry, and another who is a First Nation Lands rights protester in N Australia.

In the critical thesis, I intend to explore how contemporary writers of different nationalities are creating novels which explore the increasing interconnectedness of things. I hope to show how the settler migrant experience is developing from a historical duality of an England/Australia experience to the plurality of a ‘transnational’ experience, reframing the adventure story within the context of 21st century global change and climate crisis. I also hope to touch on the ethics of borrowing voices and questions about cultural appropriation.

I have worked for The Open University since 2006 – first as a tutor, now as a Staff tutor, managing ‘international’ students for the school of Arts and Cultures, as well as those living in Northern Britain. I am a Senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy, I have a PGCE in English and Drama from Goldsmith’s College, and a distinction in my MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. The pedagogy of teaching and learning is an area of interest and I have led several staff development conferences as well as presenting papers. I am also busy with a scholarship project looking at Creative Writing and Mental Health.

Sarah Bower

Although I’ve been writing since I was a small child, I began to do so professionally in 2002, when I graduated from the University of East Anglia Creative Writing MA programme. Before that I ran a hospice for sick children. I have also made my living in ways as various as wire drawing and being a knife thrower’s assistant in a circus.

My PhD project is a multi-period novel, as yet untitled, which takes place in Paris in the 1780s and Delaware in the late 1960s. What links these two periods is pioneering flight and the little considered but vital role of women needle workers in its development. The novel is a polyvocal tale of the women who stitched together the Montgolfier hot air balloons and the seamstresses at Playtex who made the Apollo spacesuits. It also teases out parallels between these two ages of revolution and the dynamics of reason and romanticism lying behind the impulsion to flight. My research is into the polyvocal novel and also into ‘method writing’: how the novelist researches by doing.

I have published three novels, two historical and one contemporary. My first novel, The Needle in the Blood, is about the making of the Bayeux Tapestry and my PhD project will revisit some of its themes. I am also a short story writer and essayist. I work as a mentor for The Literary Consultancy as well as teaching creative writing at the OU. For ten years, I managed the Emerging Translator Mentoring Scheme, first at the British Centre for Literary Translation and more recently at the National Centre for Writing. I am stepping down from this role to focus on my PhD, but my interest in fiction in translation abides.

Emily Bullock

I won the Bristol Short Story Prize with her story ‘My Girl’, which was also broadcast on BBC Radio 4. My short stories have been included in collections such as Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology, A Short Affair (Scribner, 2018), and Bath Short Story Prize Anthology. I have an MA in 19th Century Literature from King’s College London, an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and completed my PhD at The Open University, where I am now a Staff Tutor in Creative Writing.

I completed my PhD in 2014. It was focused on writing a novel about boxing, and examining representations of boxing in literature. This work was published in 2015 as The Longest Fight. The novel was shortlisted for the Cross Sports Book Awards and listed in The Independent’s Paperbacks of the Year. My second novel, Inside the Beautiful Inside, was published in October 2020.

Sarah Butler

I am writing a novel, set in Elephant and Castle in south London, which spans from the Second World War to the present day. The novel, and the accompanying critical commentary, will explore the temporal and spatial nature of ageing. My intention is to disrupt contemporary assumptions about, and representations of, ageing in relation to urban, domestic and institutional space, and investigate age-prejudice in relation to our fears for the future, and our negotiations of our past, present, future and imagined selves. I will explore ideas of loss, death and mortality and how these relate to concepts of narrative, linearity and the idea of an 'ending'.

I have two novels, Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love (2013) and Before The Fire (2015), both published by Picador in the UK and translated into several other languages. I have a BA in English Literature from St Catharine’s College, Cambridge; an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and an MSc in Urban Studies from University College London.

I have worked in literature development since 2001: as a literature development officer in Leicester; a youth literature worker in Tower Hamlets, London; and as a freelance practitioner since 2006. I have developed a socially-engaged writing practice with a focus on place and urban change. Recent writing residencies include writer-in-residence on the Central line; at Great Ormond Street Hospital; a digital residency for The Secret Garden Project; and Tideline – a public art project linked to a major regeneration project in Belvedere, East London.

Elizabeth Clack

Having gained a BA Hons in 1997 with The Open University, I trained as a teacher under the Graduate Teacher Programme. After qualifying, I specialised in teaching A-level History and English Literature and Language. I live and work in Essex, teaching Post 16 at a vibrant 11-19 academy.

In 2018, I achieved an Open University MA with Distinction in Creative Writing and began my part-time PhD in Creative Writing in October 2019.

My family run a magic shop in Clerkenwell, London and it is there I got the idea for Memora, the working title of my novel. I discovered that in the early years of the twentieth century, it became fashionable for pioneering magicians working the stage to present their inventions using attractive women. These include P T Selbit, an inventive magician who created the now-famous sawing illusion. My work explores the Gothic theme of women-in-peril through the character of a stage magician’s assistant.  The creative component of my thesis is a novel set in the world of Edwardian theatrical magic. The work explores the way illicit desires are controlled and suppressed but made overt in public by way of stage performances. The central character evolves from the archetypal ‘beautiful, vulnerable, female stage assistant’, into a free-thinking woman modelled on those who had begun to challenge their inferior status. The research will explore female resourcefulness in Edwardian society, where women, even in the seeming freedom of theatreland, were bound by societal codes that subjugated them.

Alistair Daniel

My PhD is a novel entitled Montreal, exploring the explosive tensions among a group of European students working at a summer camp in Maine. My critical dissertation will examine the ways in which the trauma narrative can be merged with the bildungsroman to offer an innovative new approach.

I have an MA in English Literature from Edinburgh University and an MPhil in Publishing Studies from Stirling, after which I began my working life as an assistant editor in film, media and cultural studies at Routledge. For the last 15 years I’ve worked as a freelance copy-editor and proofreader, mainly for arts festivals in the UK and Ireland.

 I’ve been writing seriously since completing an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths in 2002. My short stories have appeared in newspapers and journals in the US, the UK and Ireland, and my story collection Marriage a la Mode was shortlisted for Salt Press’ Scott Prize in 2013, while my first novel, The Fault Line, was longlisted for the Bridport First Novel Award in 2015. Since 2008 I’ve been an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University. I’ve long harboured ambitions to embark on a PhD in creative writing, and my new novel project has finally given me the opportunity.

Shanta Everington

My PhD project, The Other Mothers, uses creative life writing to explore the hidden lives of mothers through adoption, surrogacy and egg donation along with their 'silent partners' – birth mothers, surrogates and egg donors. The project is situated in the context of contemporary life writing, including women’s life writing, multi-subject biographies, writing about living subjects and unknown subjects, and writing interweaving biographical and autobiographical elements.

The critical investigation will explore the traditions of life writing, ethical and methodological issues, interdisciplinary connections, the nature of truth, and debates around creatively transforming life into literature.

I worked for many years in the charity sector before deciding to pursue my love of writing with the MA Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, for which I received a Distinction, and which led to the publication of my debut novel, Marilyn and Me, narrated by a young woman with a learning disability who models herself on Marilyn Monroe.

Successes include a short story, Hang Up, shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, and I have also published young adult fiction – Boy Red, narrated by sixteen-year-old Red, who finds out he was conceived by a sperm donor, and XY, a dystopian story set in a world where babies are born neither male nor female.  Much of my writing explores recurring themes of difference, identity and belonging, themes which I expect to feature heavily in my PhD life writing.

Visit www.shantaeverington.co.uk

Nicky Harlow

My PhD included a contemporary novel entitled, When I am Laid in Earth in which a woman is murdered, but this crime is not the focus of the story; the three very different men in her life must learn to live in a divided town without her and with each other. My critical commentary is split into the three main areas explored through the writing process: establishing the key lineage of Domestic Noir in relation to Sensation Fiction and the use of Gothic tropes in the modern cultural setting; the creation of landscape and domestic settings with their own narratives, and finally, the nature, revelation and interpretation of material evidence in crime fiction.

I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to develop networks and research outside of my usual areas. During my PhD study, I gave presentations at conferences, worked as a creative consultant on the Andrew Marr series, ‘Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers’, convened a series of seminars, ‘The Rise of the Detective Novel’ at UCL and undertook a ‘Crime and Publishment’ and a critical reading course, among many other activities.

My first novel, Amelia and the Virgin was published in 2011 by Pewter Rose Press.

Edward Hogan

My PhD included a novel called The Electric – a family saga set on the south coast of England. The critical commentary explored D/deafness, the rise and fall of British cinemagoing, and the role of women in police families. The unifying theme of the PhD was narrative disruption.

I found the experience of writing in a university environment very stimulating. My writing practice was challenged and informed by disciplines such as anthropology, oral history, and psychoanalysis. As part of my project, I spent two years learning British Sign Language.

The Electric was published by John Murray in 2020. My earlier novels include Blackmoor, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, and The Hunger Trace. I now work as a lecturer at The Open University.

Deirdre Lynn

My PhD thesis explored place and belonging in contemporary Irish fiction, and the accompanying novel interlinked themes of Anglo-Irish identity and artistic development.

After studying English at King’s College, London, I moved to Vienna and worked as an editor for an international organisation. I also wrote about politics and arts for The Irish Times.

I left Austria for Russia where I became a copy-editor at The Moscow Times and spent my spare time at the Gnessin Academy of Music. My MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University included a novel that drew on my Russian musical experience. The Open University awarded me a Studentship for their first PhD in Creative Writing, which enabled me to carry out research in Ireland. I participated in the Yeats Summer School and stayed at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. I was also awarded a residency at the Heinrich Böll cottage on Achill Island, which was the perfect place to mull over collective memory and displacement from the homeland.

Zoe Marriott

My research is driven by the writing of a dual narrative timeslip novel, A Sudden Light, in which two very different young women – Xanthe and Jude – living in the same location but separated by one hundred years, start to perceive and influence each other, and become aware of the non-linear, cyclical nature of time. Their connection offers the pair a new kind of strength and consolation, but also transforms and endangers them, as Xanthe increasingly transgresses against the unspoken rules for women in her time, and Jude begins to lose her grasp on her own life and safety in the 21st century.

My exegesis will seek to explore how our subjective human experiences can be linked to modern concepts of non-linear space-time. The idea is to use both Romantic imaginative techniques and 'realistic' literary mimesis to create a kind of ‘new realism’ that embraces and values idiosyncratic, non-deterministic ways of perceiving and living in time, instead of attempting to filter or reframe them using ‘Euclidean Goggles’.

After leaving education at the age of seventeen, I worked as a dental nurse, then a civil servant, and was a carer for my father before becoming a full-time writer. I have published ten novels for young adults (nine traditionally, one through self-publishing), which are critically acclaimed for their nuanced portrayals of diverse, marginalised identities, and re-imaginings of world folklore and mythology. My work won the Hillingdon Book award, The Great Britain Sasakawa Prize, a USBBY Outstanding International Book listing, and a Junior Library Guild Selection, among many others. From 2017-2019 I was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at York St. John University.

I graduated from Kingston University in 2020 with a master's degree in Creative Writing with distinction, and was the winner of the 2019-20 Creative Writing Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement. My dissertation was supervised by Hanif Kureishi.

Heather Richardson

My PhD thesis comprises a novel, Freethinkers, and a critical commentary which examines the ways memory, research and imagination come together when writing an historical novel. Freethinkers is set in Edinburgh from 1682-97, and draws on the true story of Thomas Aikenhead, the last man to be executed for blasphemy in Britain. The novel explores themes of belief, betrayal and religious freedom.

I enjoy the research element of writing, particularly when the setting is in the past, and am particularly interested in the ways location and artefacts contribute to the creative process. As part of my PhD research I stayed in Edinburgh, experiencing the sites of Aikenhead’s life and death. I also visited the British Library in London to handle some of the pamphlets that were published by his former friends at the time of his trial.

The novel was published under the new title Doubting Thomas (Vagabond Press, 2017) and was named as one of the nine best Scottish fiction books by The Independent in 2018.

Katie Robinson

My PhD involves writing a collection of short stories alongside a critical thesis. These will explore the representation of the disabled body in horror fiction.

I want to explore whether it is possible to have plausible portrayals, (meaning portrayals which show physical and mental disabilities, in a clear and unexaggerated or obstructive way) of the bodies and voices of characters with physical and mental disabilities while still respecting the generic conventions of horror.

I think this is an important topic to research for multiple reasons, primarily that despite the growth of Disability Studies, it has frequently remained absent from literary criticism (Bolt 2007, pp. 2–3). I am interested in the horror genre because of the way it can speak to people and the portrayal of mental health and disability in genre fiction matters.

In the creative piece I intend for each short story to focus on one disability and one horror subgenre in order to demonstrate how it is possible to have a frightening story without using harmful stereotypes. While the critical piece will look at the history of disability representation in the horror genre and at the value of plausible representation, with an examination of both examples of poor representation and plausible representation.

My publishing history comprises one novella, A Man in Winter published by Brigids Gate Press in July 2022 and was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Awards. I have also published several short stories including, Scratching in The Horrorzines Book of Ghost Stories which came out in July 2020 and won Best Anthology in the 23rd Annual Critters Readers’ Poll. In Aug 2021, I had a short story published in the Water: Selkies, Sirens and Sea Monsters anthology, which won the Douglas Barbour Award in September 2022.

Emma Sweeney

I studied English at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (MA: distinction). My practice-based PhD at the OU provided me with a privileged opportunity for professional development – both as a writer and scholar. My research centred on first-person narratives from the perspectives of characters with learning disabilities, thus allowing me to combine two of my great passions: creative writing and disability rights. And the insights and experiences I gained led to writing residencies at disability and care organisations such as MENCAP.

Owl Song at Dawn, the novel that comprised part of my PhD, was published in the UK in 2016 (Legend Press), and was translated into German and Chinese. It went on to win Nudge Books Book of the Year Award, and I was named an Amazon Rising Star and a Hive Rising Writer.

Stemming from SomethingRhymed.com – a website on female literary friendship that I launched during my PhD with my own friend Emily Midorikawa – we co-wrote our debut non-fiction book. A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf was published in the UK and USA in 2017 (Aurum, UK; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, USA). In her foreword, Margaret Atwood described the work as a great 'service to literary history' and The Financial Times called it ‘an exceptional act of literary espionage’.

I have won various prizes for my writing (including from the Royal Literary Fund, the Arts Council and the Society of Authors) and have been shortlisted for various others (including The Asham Award, International Fish and Wasafiri Prize). My short fiction has been published in literary magazines in the UK, USA and Ireland, and I have written for the likes of The Paris Review, TIME and The Washington Post.

Patrick Wright

My PhD looks to develop contemporary theory and practice on the idea of ekphrasis. I am particularly interested in writing poems in response to modern art, especially paintings characterised by obscurity or apparent emptiness – such as the late work of Turner and Rothko. Taking into account postmodern criticism, I am also examining the dynamic interaction between the poet and the image, and how visual, poetic and critical registers might work alongside each other. My plan is for this to lead to a full poetry collection and critical monograph. My supervisors are Siobhan Campbell and Jane Yeh.

I am one of the rare individuals who has already completed a PhD. This was in English at the University of Manchester. My thesis focused on the feminine sublime and the sacred, and was supervised by Professor Terry Eagleton. I graduated, more recently, with an MA (Distinction) from the same university in Creative Writing. I have a pamphlet, Nullaby, published by Eyewear (2017). I have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and my poems have appeared in several magazines, including Ink, Sweat and Tears, Agenda, The Reader, Iota, and Brittle Star. I also write scholarly articles on poetry and creativity.

I have taught Arts and Humanities modules at The Open University since 2008, and I have worked as an Associate Lecturer at the University of Manchester, University of Salford, and the MMU. Research into the teaching of poetry in Higher Education has resulted in a HEA Fellowship.