Creative Writing and Publishing staff
Andy Brown
Andy Brown is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Exeter University and known widely as a distinguished poet and writing tutor. His many poetry books include Casket (Shearsman, 2019); Bloodlines (Worple, 2018); Watersong (Shearsman, 2015); Exurbia (Worple, 2014); The Fool and the Physician (Salt, 2012); Goose Music (with John Burnside, Salt, 2008) and Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996 - 2006 (Salt, 2006), among others.
Vesna Goldsworthy
Professor Vesna Goldsworthy is a novelist, memoirist and poet with many years' experience in teaching creative writing and English literature. She came to academia after a career at the BBC and she still produces and presents radio and TV programmes internationally. Her first novel Gorsky (2015) was the New York Times Editor's Choice and Waterstones Book of the Month, as well as being long-listed for the Baileys Prize and serialised as Book at Bedtime on BBC Radio Four.
Daisy Hay
Daisy Hay is Associate Professor of English Literature and Life Writing, and a practicing biographer. She is the author of three biographies – Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (2010), Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance (2015) and Dinner with Joseph Johnson (forthcoming, 2022) as well a short book about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (2018).
Anna Kiernan
Anna’s teaching and research centres on the value of arts, culture, and particularly literary media, for social change. Anna has a background in publishing and the creative industries and is co-director of the MA Creativity: Innovation and Business Strategy. Anna took over as publisher at The Literary Platform (TLP), a digital publishing agency, in 2019, after being awarded funding from Arts Council England.
Rob Magnuson Smith
Rob Magnuson Smith is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Exeter University’s Penryn campus. His debut novel The Gravedigger won The William Faulkner Award. According to Publisher’s Weekly, ‘Smith's well-wrought prose beautifully captures the tone of an English village and the awakening of a man whose livelihood depends on death but whose fear keeps him from living.’
Sam North
Sam North left school at 16 and worked as a groom, as a motorcycle messenger, as a runner on film sets, doing fight sequences for 1980s pop videos, on building sites, as well as undertaking episodes of travel in Europe and the Americas. Aged 29 he published his first novel, which won a Somerset Maugham award, and in his thirties wrote a further three novels and worked as the head of development for a television company producing documentaries and dramas for the BBC and Channel 4.
Wendy O'Shea Meddour
Wendy is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing. She is specialises in critical theory and contemporary children’s literature, and has established an international reputation for publishing children’s books that promote child wellbeing. Books include the best-selling Wendy Quill series, The Secret Railway series, How the Library (not the Prince) Saved Rapunzel and Dottie Blanket and the Hilltop.
Kate Wallis
Kate is an editor and literary producer with twenty years’ experience of working in the publishing industry. She was previously Head of Humanities at Palgrave Macmillan, responsible for paperback publishing across history, literature, theatre and language. She worked for four years as an Editor and Producer at Kenya’s leading literary publisher Kwani Trust.
John Wedgwood-Clarke
John writes a lot about rubbish. Damaged and dislocated things, places and people are strangely revealing about the values of our culture and where we draw lines between the valuable and the valueless. He is currently an AHRC Leadership Fellow working on an 18 month creative writing research project about a polluted river in West Cornwall, near where he grew up.
Ellen Wiles
Ellen Wiles is a writer who loves exploring different forms, fields, and cultures. She is a novelist, anthropologist, and curator, as well as a Lecturer in Creative Writing. In previous lives she has worked as a human rights barrister and as a busker, in a refugee camp in Thailand, and with displaced Bushmen in Botswana. Ellen’s first novel, The Invisible Crowd (Harper Collins, 2017) was awarded a Victor Turner Prize.