Group Members

Joanna Nadin

Joanna writes novels for teenagers and adults that explore shifting identities, particularly related to class, as well as books for younger children celebrating curiosity and non-conformity, often through the device of comedy. She’s been nominated three times for the Carnegie Medal, and shortlisted for the Lollies and Roald Dahl Funny Prize, while the TV adaptation of Joe All Alone is now a BAFTA-winning and Emmy-nominated BBC drama.

Mimi Thebo

Mimi writes narratives for young teens - mainly about recovering from trauma and about our connection to a natural world that has been compromised and mediated by human activities. Her stories are hopeful, but realistic and are centred on the life of the family. She had been nominated and short-listed for many literary prizes and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal in both 2017 and 2018.

Carrie Etter

Carrie is interested in articulating trauma through innovation in contemporary poetry and short fiction. Her poetry ranges from the linguistically innovative to the elliptical lyric to the verse novel, and she has particular interests in prose poetry, ecopoetry, and poetry engaging with classical mythology. Her most recent collection, The Weather in Normal (2018), in part addresses the climate crisis, particularly its effects on the American Midwest.

Billy Kahora

Billy is currently working on a multi-vocal novel that attempts to capture a key political moment in Kenya during a Constitutional referendum. Based on this, his research interests are narrative voice, novelistic societal registers and multi-vocality. He is also interested in creative writing teaching histories and pedagogies and involved in past (and ongoing events) on the African continent around this.

Madhu Krishnan

Madhu’s current project looks, among other things, at the role of creative writing and practice in the production of decolonial knowledge. She is also interested in the figure of the writer as key activist in the project of social production, and the potential for creative-critical forms of writing to engage publics and decentre Eurocentric models of intellectual production.

Lesel Dawson

Lesel’s research focuses on the relationship between grief and creativity, examining how the imagination impacts loss and adaptive grieving. She is the Arts and Culture Lead for The Good Grief Festival and has collaborated with artists, theatre companies, charities and community organisations on a variety of grief-related creative outputs.

Michael Kalisch

Michael is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, working on modern and contemporary American literature. He is particularly interested in connections between the history of the novel and the history of ideas; in Jewish American writing; in creative-critical practice; in the institutional contexts of literary production; and in minor and ‘failed’ writers and literary forms.

Noreen Masud

Noreen’s research centres on the literature of the early-to-mid-twentieth-century, particularly Stevie Smith, Edith Sitwell, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein and Willa Cather. She works on writers who, in one way or another, disrupt narratives about what good literature should be or do: who present themselves variously as absurd, unrevealing, embarrassing, or useless.

Jessica Moor

Jessica Moor is a novelist whose work explores themes of feminism, victimhood, complicity and female agency. She is particularly interested in narratives that examine violence against women and girls. She was an Observer Best Debut Novelist of 2020, and her work has been long listed for the Desmond Elliot prize and shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of America Award. She was the winner of the 2022 Nouvelle Voix du Polar prize.

Tom Sperlinger

Tom Sperlinger is a Professor in the English Department. He is author of a memoir, Romeo and Juliet in Palestine (2015), co-author of Who are universities for? (2018), and is completing a book called A Man Who Wasn’t There. He has published journalism of various kinds and poetry.

William Wootten

William is a poet and critic. He has published on many modern and contemporary poets, including Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter and is currently working on the psychology of verse form.