December 08, 2007

Paddy Lyons


Paddy Lyons is Senior Lecturer in English Literature. Before coming to Scotland he taught in Ireland, at Trinity College Dublin and at the National College of Art, and in England, at the University of East Anglia. More recently, he has taught in the US, at Dartmouth College New Hampshire, where he was Visiting Professor in 1999; and in Poland, at the University of Warsaw, where he was on secondment 1994-97, and where he holds a personal professorship.

He has specialised in the poetry and drama of the Restoration - in particular: Rochester and Congreve. He maintains a strong commitment to Literary Theory, on which he has lectured widely, and was one of the last translators of Althusser into English to be authorised by Althusser during that philosopher's lifetime; his ongoing work on inter-relations between the literary and the history of literacy is conducted in an Althusserian perspective. He has been active, too, in promoting women's writing: he is editor of the widely-used 1818 text of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and (with the actress and novelist Fidelis Morgan) of Female Playwrights of the Restoration. He contributes to the faculty courses in comparative literature; and has written on a range of twentieth and twenty-first century writing: poetry, fiction, drama, and the cinema of Pedro Almodovar.

December 05, 2007

Carol Clewlow


A journalist by trade, Carol Clewlow’s first publication at the end of the l970s was a travel book, Hongkong and Macau, the second one to be published by the then fledgling but now famous Lonely Planet company. Her first novel, Keeping the Faith, written ten years later while a mature student at university was short listed for the Whitbread Prize first novel prize. Her second, the best selling A Woman's Guide to Adultery was translated into 15 languages and turned into a TV mini series while a third Love in the Modern Sense plus a number of her short stories have been read on Radio 4. As well as fiction, she has a keen interest in drama, adapting a further novel One For The Money, set in the rock music industry, for performance at the Edinburgh Fringe. The first writer in residence in a UK medical school, she is a founder member of Operating Theatre (http://www.operatingtheatre.org.uk/), based in Northern Stage in Newcastle, and at the Newcastle Medical School and for whom she has written more than a dozen plays on health and medical issues. Her latest novel, also a best seller, is Not Married Not Bothered. An experienced teacher of creative writing, she is currently working on a sixth novel.