Richard Aczel teaches English and American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Cologne. His translations from Hungarian include Dezsó Kosztolányi’s Skylark (Chatto & Windus, 1993) and Pétér Esterházy’s The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994). He has also written many books on the subject of creative writing in the classroom.
David Almond (FRSL) writes for children and adults. His novels are Skellig, Kit’s Wilderness, Heaven Eyes and Secret Heart. His story collection Counting Stars is set in his home town, Felling-on-Tyne. His many awards include the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year. His work is translated into over twenty languages.
His most recent works include A Song for Ella Grey (2014), The Tightrope Walkers (2014), a novel for young adults, and The Colour of the Sun (2018). He lives in Newcastle with his family.
Elleke Boehmer is the author of the novels Screens Against the Sky (Bloomsbury, 1990), An Immaculate Figure (Bloomsbury, 1993) and Bloodlines (2001), as well as many short stories. She has published many works of criticism, including the well-known Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford, 1995) and most recently Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She describes herself as a writer-critic and is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford. Her most recent collection of stories is Sharmilla, and Other Portraits (Jacana, 2010).
Professor Sir Malcolm Bradbury founded, with Sir Angus Wilson, the UEA MA course in Creative Writing in 1980, the first such course in Britain. At the time of his death in 2000, he was Professor of American Studies, a leading novelist and scriptwriter. His eight novels include Eating People is Wrong (1959), The History Man (1975, made into a major television series), Rates of Exchange (1983, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and, most recently, To the Hermitage (2000). For film and television he adapted Porterhouse Blue, Cold Comfort Farm and many other works, and wrote episodes of Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost and Dalziel and Pascoe. Critical works include The Modern British Novel (1994), The Atlas of Literature (1996) and Dangerous Pilgrimages (1996). He was knighted in 2000.
Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since the age of eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, four fantasy series (under three different names), and two ghost stories at novel length. He lost count of his short stories long ago. His work has won awards on two continents (so far).
Russell Celyn Jones is the author of the novels Soldiers and Innocents, Small Times, An Interference of Light, The Eros Hunter, Surface Tension, Ten Seconds from the Sun and The Ninth Wave – a rewriting of the Mabinogion.
Lindsay Clarke is the author of the novels Sunday Whiteman, The Chymical Wedding (which won the Whitbread Fiction Prize in 1989) and Alice’s Masque, all published by Picador. His most recent novel, The Water Theatre, was published in 2010 by Alma Books.
Steve Cole spent a quiet childhood dreaming of being a superhero and aspiring to amuse. At school his teachers often despaired of him – one of them went so far as to ban him from her English lessons, which enhanced his reputation no end. Having grown up liking stories, he went to university to read more of them before working as an editor of books and magazines for both children and grown-ups (including his childhood favourite, Doctor Who). He wrote books in his spare time until 2002 when he decided to make his full-time living as an author. Since then he has created and written several successful book series such as Astrosaurs, Cows In Action, The Slime Squad, Z. Rex, Young Bond, Secret Agent Mummy and many more, with sales in excess of three million copies.
Jon Cook is Emeritus Professor at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA. He has published critical books and articles on Romantic and post-Romantic writing, cultural theory, creative writing and contemporary poetry. He was Convenor of the Creative Writing MA at UEA from 1986 to 1994, and Director of the Centre for the Creative and Performing Arts, UEA. He is a Literature Advisor to the British Council.
David Craig was born in Aberdeen in 1932. He is married to the writer Anne Spillard and lives in Cumbria. He has taught for thirty-seven years at Lancaster University, where he is Professor (Emeritus) of Creative Writing. His novel King Cameron is in print with Carcanet and his trilogy of prose books, Native Stones, On the Crofter’s Trail and Landmarks, with Pimlico. He lives in Cumbria.
Amanda Dalton is a prize-winning poet and dramatist. Her first collection, How to Disappear, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize. She has worked as an English teacher and Deputy Headteacher in comprehensive schools in Leicestershire and as Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank, its writing centre in Yorkshire. In 2005–6 she held the Fellowship in Creative Writing at Leeds University and is currently Honorary Fellow in the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She regularly teaches creative writing and is currently an Associate Artist at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, Visiting Teaching Fellow (Script and Poetry) at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Writing School.
Kit de Waal has won numerous awards for her short stories and flash fiction. Her debut novel, My Name is Leon, won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Costa Debut Novel, the British Book Awards Debut and the Desmond Elliott Prize. In 2016, she founded the Kit de Waal Scholarship at Birkbeck University for a disadvantaged writer to study creative writing. She is also editing an anthology of working-class writing, Common People, which will be published in May 2019. Her latest novel, The Trick to Time, was published in 2018 and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Patricia Duncker is the author of Hallucinating Foucault (winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize in 1996), The Deadly Space Between, James Miranda Barry and Miss Webster and Chérif (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2007). She has written two books of short fiction, Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1997) and Seven Tales of Sex and Death, and a collection of essays on writing and contemporary literature, Writing on the Wall. In 2010 she published The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award 2010 and the Green Carnation Prize 2011). Her most recent novel, the critically acclaimed Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015), was also shortlisted for the Green Carnation Award 2015.
Nell Dunn was born in London in 1936. Her first book, Up the Junction (1963), was filmed by Ken Loach for the BBC. Her second novel, Poor Cow, was a bestseller and also filmed by Loach, with Nell jointly writing the screenplay. Her book Talking to Women, first published in 1965 and republished by Silver Press in 2018, was an early exploration of what women wanted and cared about. A book of poetry written jointly with Adrian Henri, I Want, was published in 1972. Her first play, Steaming, opened in 1981 and her latest, Home Death, in 2011. Her 1996 novel, My Silver Shoes (Bloomsbury), revisited the character of Joy from Poor Cow. She lives in London with her dachshunds Iris and Tulip.
Vicki Feaver was born in Nottingham in 1943 and educated at Durham University and University College, London. She is the author of three poetry collections: Close Relatives (1981); The Handless Maiden (1994) which was the winner of the Heinemann Award and shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Poetry Collection of the Year; and The Book of Blood (2006) which was shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Poetry Award. The Handless Maiden includes the poems ‘Lily Pond’, winner of the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition, and ‘Judith’, winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem. In 1993 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and in 1999 a Cholmondeley Award. Her work has also been included in several contemporary poetry anthologies, including Penguin Modern Poets 2 (1995) (with Carol Ann Duffy and Eavan Boland), After Ovid (1996), an anthology of several translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1998). Professor Feaver has also published essays on the process of writing and on twentieth-century women poets. She is a former tutor of Creative Writing at University College, Chichester, and now lives in South Lanarkshire, Scotland.
Alison Fell is a prize-winning novelist and poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Dreams, Like Heretics, and her novels include Mer de Glace, The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro and The Mistress of Lilliput. She also co-wrote Mapping the Edge, a site-specific theatre piece, with Amanda Dalton and Bernardine Evaristo, first staged at the Sheffield Crucible in September 2001 and subsequently adapted for BBC Radio 3. Her most recent novel, The Element – Inth in Greek, was published in 2012.
Maureen Freely was born in Neptune, New Jersey, and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. Since graduating from Harvard in 1974, she has lived mostly in England. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the Warwick Writing Programme, where she has worked since 1996. She is the author of seven novels (Mother’s Helper, The Life of the Party, The Stork Club, Under the Vulcania, The Other Rebecca, Enlightenment and – most recently – Sailing through Byzantium) as well as three works of non-fiction (Pandora’s Clock, What About Us? – An Open Letter to the Mothers Feminism Forgot and The Parent Trap). She is the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk (Snow, The Black Book, Istanbul: Memories of a City, Other Colours and The Museum of Innocence) and she has also translated or co-translated a number of memoirs, biographies, rising stars and twentieth-century classics. Her translation with Alexander Dawe of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar was awarded the Modern Languages Association Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for three decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing.
James Friel’s most recent novel is The Posthumous Affair. His other novels include The Higher Realm, Left of North, Taking the Veil and Careless Talk. He is programme leader for the MA in Writing at Liverpool John Moores University.
Anna Garry works as Outreach Officer for the Swiss research network NCCR MUST (National Centre for Competence in Research, Molecular Ultrafast Science and Technology), ETH Zurich, Switzerland. At Manchester University she studied Biology, and then completed a Ph.D. in Political Science. She is also a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA. Her poetry has been published in Critical Quarterly, Pretext and Reactions.
Lesley Glaister (FRSL) is a fiction writer, poet, playwright and teacher of writing. Her first novel was published in 1990 and since then she’s published thirteen further adult novels, the first in a trilogy of YA novels and numerous short stories. She received both a Somerset Maugham and a Betty Trask award for Honour Thy Father (1990), won the Yorkshire Post Author of the Year Award in 1993 for Limestone and Clay; the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered for Little Egypt (2014) and has been short- and longlisted for literary prizes for her other work. Several of her plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and her first stage play, Bird Calls, was performed at Sheffield’s Crucible Studio Theatre in 2004. Mariscat Press published her pamphlet of poetry, Visiting the Animal, in 2015. She has three grown-up sons and lives in Edinburgh (with frequent sojourns to Orkney) with husband Andrew Greig. She teaches creative writing at the University of St Andrews.
Julian Jackson lives and works in Norfolk. He also works in collaboration on a number of different ventures: installation art, live robotic poetry, techno-treasure hunts, gallery art spoofs, websites, teaching, and many paper publishing projects for regional organizations. He is also a professional chef.
Keith Jarrett writes poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in several anthologies and magazines, including Attitude and Filigree: contemporary Black British poetry, exploring Caribbean history, religion and sexuality. His poetry collection, Selah, was published with Burning Eye. He is a UK Poetry Slam Champion, as well as FLUPP International Poetry Slam Winner (Rio de Janeiro), and a Fiction Fellow of the Lambda Writers’ Retreat in Los Angeles. His monologue play, Safest Spot in Town, was aired on BBC Four. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Birkbeck University, where he is completing his first novel, and was awarded the Bloomsbury Studentship.
John Latham has worked for over forty years as a research scientist specializing in cloud formation. A recipient of several medals from the Royal Meteorological Society, he was, for eight years, president of the International Commission on Atmospheric Electricity, and founded the Atmospheric Physics Research Group at UMIST (which later became the University of Manchester’s Centre for Atmospheric Science). In 1988 he moved to the US, to become a Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Latham is the author of six collections of poetry, including All-Clear (Peterloo Poets, 1990) and Sailor Boy (The Collective Press, 2006), as well as short fiction, one novel – Ditch-Crawl (Comma, 2006) – and several radio plays, which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. His poetry has won first prize in over twenty competitions, and the title poem for his latest collection From Professor Murasaki’s Notebooks on the Effects of Lightning on the Human Body won second prize in the UK’s 2006 National Poetry Competition.
Amy Liptrot grew up on a sheep farm on the west coast of Orkney. Her 2016 memoir, The Outrun, won the Wainwright Prize for nature and travel writing and the PEN Ackerley Prize for memoir and has been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Yorkshire and is writing her next book.
David Lodge taught English Literature at the University of Birmingham for many years before retiring to focus on his writing full-time. His novels have received the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice. He has also written several esteemed volumes of literary criticism. David holds several honorary doctorate degrees and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1998, he was awarded a CBE for services to literature. He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham.
Alan Mahar is an author and publisher. Born in Liverpool, Mahar studied at the University of London before moving to Birmingham in 1976, working at Solihull College and living first in Sparkhill and then in Moseley. He was a founder of the Tindal Street Fiction Group in 1982, and of the Tindal Street Press, where he was the Publishing Director, in 1998. His 1999 novel Flight Patterns told the story of a French parachutist in Liverpool in 1957, while his 2002 second novel After the Man Before concerns urban renewal in 1980s Birmingham. He has had short stories published in journals including the London Magazine and Critical Quarterly.
Sara Maitland grew up in Galloway. She took a degree in English from Oxford University, where she discovered socialism, feminism, Christianity and friendship. Having been married to an Anglican priest for twenty years, she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993 and now lives a contemplative life in a house on a moor in northern Galloway. Sara’s first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, was published in 1978 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. A Book of Silence, an autobiographical account of her attempts to lead a solitary life, was nominated for the Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize in 2009, the same year that her short story ‘Moss Witch’ was a runner up in the BBC National Short Story Award. Her book How to Be Alone was published by the School of Life in 2014. She lectures part-time for Lancaster University’s MA in Creative Writing and is a Fellow of St Chad’s College, Durham. In 2004 Sara was listed as one of the Guardian’s ‘101 Female Public Intellectuals’.
Candi Miller was born and educated in Africa but now lives in England, where she teaches Creative Writing. In 1994 she undertook an expedition to the Kalahari Desert to visit groups of San people. There she was caught up in one of the largest veld fires ever to sweep the sub-continent, charged by a bull elephant and enchanted by storytelling around a campfire. Her novels about these experiences are Salt & Honey and Kalahari Passage, both published by Tindal Street Press.
Esther Morgan was born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire. She first started writing poetry while working as a volunteer at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 1997, she taught on UEA’s undergraduate creative writing course and for the Department of Continuing Education. During her time at UEA Morgan edited four editions of the poetry anthology Reactions. As well as freelance teaching and editing she helped set up The Poetry Archive, the world’s largest online collection of poets reading their own work, working as the site’s Historic Recordings Manager for several years: www.poetryarchive.org. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1998, and her first collection, Beyond Calling Distance, was published by Bloodaxe in 2001. It won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second collection, The Silence Living in Houses (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), was largely inspired by her time caretaking a run-down Edwardian house in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. In 2010 she won the Bridport Poetry Prize for her poem ‘This Morning’, included in her third collection Grace (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her fourth collection, The Wound Register, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018 and was shortlisted for poetry category of the East Anglian Book Awards 2018. After four years in Oxfordshire she moved back to Norfolk, where she lives with her husband and daughter and currently works for Norfolk Museums Service.
Graham Mort is a British writer, editor and tutor. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry and two volumes of short fiction, and has written radio drama for BBC Radio 4. He has won both the Bridport Prize and the Edge Hill Prize for short fiction. His poetry collection Visibility: New and Selected Poems was published by Seren in 2007. The Guardian Review of Books comments that it ‘perfectly exhibits the blend of formal scrupulousness, sensory evocation and intellectual rigour that has shaped his reputation’. He received a major Eric Gregory award from the Society of Authors for his first collection of poems, A Country on Fire, and Circular Breathing was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Graham won the 2007 Bridport International Short Story Prize for his story ‘The Prince’. His first collection of short fiction, Touch, was published by Seren in 2010 and won the Edge Hill Prize in 2011. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Transcultural Literature at Lancaster Univeristy.
Jenny Newman is the author of two novels, Going In (Penguin Books) and Life Class (Chatto & Windus). She is also the editor of The Faber Book of Seductions and co-editor of Women Talk Sex: autobiographical writing on sex, sexuality and sexual identity (Scarlet Press) and The Writer’s Workbook (Arnold). She is the head of the Centre for Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. In addition to her novels she has written and edited several academic works and books on creative writing.
Susan Perabo is the author of the short story collections Who I Was Supposed to Be and Why They Run the Way They Do and the novels The Broken Places and The Fall of Lisa Bellow. Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories and New Stories from the South, and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review and The Sun. She is writer in residence and professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Queens University. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Penny Rendall is the founding publisher of Tindal Street Press and a member of Tindal Street Fiction Group. Previously she worked as a freelance proofreader, copy-editor, editor and translator, and taught English in Iran and Venezuela. She lives in Birmingham with her family and a stream of visitors.
Carol Rumens (FRSL) is the author of fourteen collections of poems, as well as occasional fiction, drama and translation. She has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize, and was joint recipient of an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. Her most recent publication is the prose book, Self into Song, based on three poetry lectures delivered in the Bloodaxe-Newcastle University Lecture Series. She is currently Professor in Creative Writing at Bangor University. Her latest collection is De Chirico’s Threads, published by Seren Books.
Victor Sage is Emeritus Professor at the University of East Anglia. As well as academic writing he is a novelist and short-story writer. He has published two novels: A Mirror for Larks (Secker and Warburg, 1993) and Black Shawl (Secker and Warburg, 1995). He co-wrote the full-length theatrical script of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, which was performed at UEA in 1997, and has published a rewrite of the death of Socrates, from the executioner’s point of view. He is currently working on a new edition of A Cultural History of European Gothic for Polity Press.
Ali Smith CBE, FRSL, was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her books have won and been shortlisted for many awards. Her recent publications include How to Be Both (2014), winner of the Goldsmiths and Baileys prizes and the Costa Book Award for Best Novel; a collection of short stories, Public Library (2015), and the novels Autumn (2016) and Winter (2017), the first two novels in a ‘seasonal quartet’. Spring will be published in 2019. Like Smith’s earlier novels Hotel World (2001), The Accidental (2005) and How to Be Both, Autumn was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Ashley Stokes is a novelist and short-story writer with over twelve years’ experience teaching creative writing at postgraduate level. As well as being a long-term editor for The Literary Consultancy, he has taught creative writing at the University of East Anglia, the Open University and Norwich University College of the Arts. His area of expertise is the popular and literary novel and the short story. A graduate of both Oxford University and UEA, Ashley Stokes’s stories have appeared in anthologies and journals since 1997. His first novel, Touching the Starfish, was published in 2010 by Unthank Books.
Alicia Stubbersfield’s most recent collection of poetry, The Yellow Table, was published in 2013. Other poetry collections include The Magician’s Assistant, Unsuitable Shoes and Joking Apart. Before becoming a lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, Alicia was an English teacher in several large comprehensive schools, most recently Cleeve School in Cheltenham. She regularly tutors for The Poetry School and Ty Newydd, National Writing Centre of Wales.
Rebecca Swift (1964–2017). Rebecca Swift read English at Oxford University and worked as an editor and writer. For seven years she worked at Virago Press, where she first conceived of the idea for The Literary Consultancy. Rebecca served as TLC Director from its inception in 1996 until her death in April 2017 aged fifty-three, after a short illness. She was a cherished and well-respected member of the literary and publishing community, and a tireless champion of writers and literary values. TLC’s continuing work honours her legacy with the Rebecca Swift Foundation and the Women’s Poets Prize. Rebecca’s own poetry was published in Virago New Poets (1990), Vintage New Writing 6 (1995), Driftwood, US (2005), Staple (2008), InterlitQ (2010) and India’s online Talking Poetry (2011). A libretto written by Rebecca was funded by the Arts Council England and commissioned by the Lontano Ensemble: the opera ‘Spirit Child’, composed by Jenni Roditi, was performed at Ocean in Hackney, London, in 2001. Rebecca wrote and reviewed for the Independent on Sunday and the Guardian. A biography of Emily Dickinson, Dickinson: Poetic Lives, came out in February 2011 with Hesperus Press and a piece for Granta online, ‘Generations’, appeared in June 2011.
Val Taylor is a director/producer, writer and script adviser, with production credits in Britain, America and Europe. Her book Stage Writing: A Practical Guide (2002) is a classic of the genre. Val also teaches screenwriting for Screen East, in conjunction with Anglia Television.
Nicole Ward Jouve was born and grew up in Provence and has spent most of her adult life in the UK. She writes both in French and in English, both fiction and essays. Among her books are short stories, Shades of Grey (Virago Press); a novel, L’Entremise (Éditions des femmes); a study of the Yorkshire Ripper case, The Streetcleaner (Marion Boyars); White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography (Routledge); and The Female Genesis: Creativity, Self and Gender (Polity Press). Her latest story to appear, ‘Narcissus and Echo’, is in Philip Terry (ed.), Ovid Metamorphosed (Chatto & Windus).
Dame Marina Warner is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Professorial Research Fellow, SOAS. Marina Warner’s mother was Italian and her father an English bookseller; she was brought up in Egypt, Belgium and Cambridge, England. She has been a writer since she was young, specializing in mythology and fairy tales, with an emphasis on the part women play in them. Her award-winning books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1982), From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994) and No Go the Bogeyman (1998). In l994 she gave the BBC Reith Lectures on the theme of ‘Six Myths of Our Time’. Her other books include Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006), Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (2011) and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (OUP, 2014). She also writes fiction: The Lost Father (1988) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and in 2000 The Leto Bundle was longlisted. She chaired the Man Booker International Prize for 2015. Her third collection of short stories, Fly Away Home, was published by Salt in autumn 2015. Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (OUP, 2014) was reissued as Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction in 2018, as well as Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists (Thames and Hudson, 2018) and The Shadow Image, edited by Rut Blees Luxemburg, with essay and photographs from a trip to China in 1975. She is also still at work on a memoir-cum-novel set in Cairo in the fifties. She is a contributing editor to The London Review of Books, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and, since 2017, President of the Royal Society of Literature. She was made DBE in 2015, and the same year was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities. In 2017 she was given a British Academy Medal and a World Fantasy Life Time Achievement Award. She is currently patron of the Ted Hughes Society, Bloodaxe Books, Society for Story Telling, Hosking Houses Trust and The Longford Trust.