Today we celebrate reading for pleasure and highlighting the importance of reading for children’s future success. Designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, World Book Day is marked in over 100 countries around the globe. To mark this special day, meet our community of Alumni and Staff who are published writers promoting reading for pleasure!
Roehampton’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences is home to English and Creative Writing programmes. This year we have two new modules which respond to the growing demand for a wider range of contemporary writing. Genre Fiction is for writers of fantasy, horror, and crime. Dark & Transgressive Writing works with erotic, hybrid, and dystopian fictions. To know more about our School and academic offer, please visit here.
Alumni
Holly Pester
MA Creative Writing Alumna, Holly, published Comic Timing (Granta Poetry) which is on the Forward Prize Best First Collection shortlist. In 2021, her poem Doctor! was ranked Poem of the Month by The Guardian.
Dr. Rachel Knightley
BA English Literature Alumna, Rachel, published Beyond Glass, a collection of modern horror short stories. These stories have featured on anthologies such as the 2022 British Fantasy Award-nominated Dreamland (Black Shuck Books) and Uncertainties Vol. 3 (Swan River Press). She is also the author of non-fiction texts, including GCSE Drama Revision and Study Guide, and is currently a visiting lecturer at Roehampton University.
Nikki Dudley
MA Creative Writing Alumna, Nikki, published Volta, winner of the Virginia Prize for Fiction. She is also a managing editor of streetcake magazine and runs it’s writing prize. Read more about her journey from Student to Novelist here.
Haleh Agar
MA Creative Writing Alumna, Haleh, is a now novelist and short story writer based in London. Her contemporary debut novel Out of Touch was published in April 2020. Haleh’s short story Not Contagious was Highly Commended by the 2019 Costa Short Story Award, and her flash fiction won the Brighton Prize. She was part of the 2021 judging panel for The London Magazine’s short story prize and is also judging Aesthetica magazine’s short story competition this year. Read more about her journey here.
Staff
Dr Alberto Fernandez-Carbajal
Dr Alberto Fernandez-Carbajal is the programme convenor for BA English Literature. Their poem Brexshitland is included in the Grist anthology We’re All in it Together: Poems for a Disunited Kingdom.
Dr Tim Atkins
Dr Tim Atkins is a lecturer on the MA Creative Writing and BA English Literature. His 2014 collection of poetry, Petrarch Collected Atkins, was a Times Literary Supplement and Salon.com Book of the Year 2014. NOTHING (Crater Press, 2021) is my most recent collection. He is a Poet, Playwright, and Prose Writer, and my work has been widely published in the USA, Canada, UK, and Europe. His writing has been studied at postgraduate level in Harvard University and at the Sorbonne.
Dr Jerome Boyd Maunsell
Dr Jerome Boyd Maunsell is a lecturer on the English and Creative Writing programmes. His novel Portraits from Life investigates the difficulties and possibilities of autobiography – the relation of fact and fiction, biography, and autobiography; the ethical issues of dealing with real people; the thin generic lines between novels and autobiographies; and the deceptive workings of memory – and how all these writers dealt with these concerns as they looked back on their lives.
