Associate Members of the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research
Claire Chambers
Claire Chambers is a lecturer at the University of York, where she teaches contemporary writing in English from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, and is currently writing a monograph entitled Representations of Muslims in Britain. Both texts in this two-book series are published by Palgrave Macmillan, and supported by funding from the British Academy and Arts and Humanities Research Council. Claire has also published widely in such journals as Postcolonial Text and Contemporary Women’s Writing, and is a Co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Her research interests include the literary, theatrical, and cinematic representations of British Muslims; post/colonial writing from Pakistan, South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas; religion, secularism, and representations; postcolonial publishing and marketing; literary prizes, festivals, and events; poststructuralist, postmodernist, and postcolonial theory; and the writing of Kamila Shamsie, Hanif Kureishi, Leila Aboulela, Salman Rushdie, Ahdaf Soueif, Amitav Ghosh, Nadeem Aslam, and others. http://www.york.ac.uk/english/our-staff/claire-chambers/ and Journal of Commonwealth Literature (of which she is co-editor) http://jcl.sagepub.com/
Ziad Elmarsafy
Ziad Elmarsafy works on the modern and contemporary literatures of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the relationship between literature and religion, philosophy and literary theory. His recent publications include The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oneworld, 2009) and Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). He has taught at universities in the USA, France and the UK. http://www.york.ac.uk/english/our-staff/ziad-elmarsafy/
Corinne Fowler
Corinne Fowler is a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Leicester. She directs an a project called Grassroutes: Contemporary Leicestershire Writing, funded by the Arts Council. Grassroutes promotes informed public engagement with published writing by Leicestershire-based writers. Her research interests include devolved literary cultures, Afghanistan and the ethics of travel. She is author of Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas About Afghanistan (Rodopi, 2007), co-editor of Travel and Ethics: Travel Writing in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2013) and Migration Stories (Crocus Books). She is co-author (with Lynne Pearce and Robert Crawshaw) of Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture (MUP, 2013). http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/people/corinnefowler and Grassroutes http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/creativewriting/grassroutes
Michael (Cawood) Green
Michael (Cawood) Green is a writer and Professor in English and Creative Writing at Northumbria University. Prior to joining Northumbria, he was Senior Professor and Head of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, and Head of the university’s School of Literary Studies, Media, and Creative Arts. At UKZN he was twice the recipient of the University’s Distinguished Teacher Award and was awarded the University Book Prize. He relocated to Northumbria University in September 2009 with the aim of returning to researching, teaching, and writing. Green’s research interests include uses of history in fiction and southern African/postcolonial fiction, which form the combined subject of his monograph Novel Histories: Past, Present, and Future in South African Fiction. He is also interested in creative writing pedagogy and exploring the nature of practice-led research. He has published around forty journal articles and book chapters and, as a practice-led researcher (under the name Michael Cawood Green), is the author of two works of historical fiction, Sinking and For the Sake of Silence (winner of the 2009 Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose). He has recently been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship to complete his next novel. http://michaelcawoodgreen.com/
Sarah Penny
Sarah Penny emigrated to the UK from South Africa in 2003 to lecture in Creative Writing at Brunel University. She is the author of a travelogue and two novels, one of which is the national set text for final year students in South Africa. She is also one half of Hadithi ya Afrika – a story-capturing project that works with underprivileged African communities using dramatherapy and creative writing techniques. Teaching interests include African fiction and children’s fiction. Her publications include The Lies We Shared (Penguin SA, 2011) and The Beneficiaries (London: Penguin Books, 2002). http://www.sarah-penny.net/
Richard Rathwell
Richard Rathwell is a Canadian and UK citizen, currently a PH.D research student at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, in the field of transcultural literature. He has published several novels and books of poetry. He has been engaged in Development Aid projects for over twenty years mainly in conflict and post conflict areas, but also in policy. His research interests include defining, engaging and critiquing the transcultural novel, related problems of reader response, strategies for transliteral publication, and how transcultural texts elicit enhanced readability, reader engagement and empathy. His research methods involve surveys with practitioners in conflict resolution and with cultural workers and writers in conflict areas. His recent publications include Jump the Devil 2011, 8th House, Montreal; Quicker and Deader, First Intensity, Kansas, 2010; Red the Nile, Blue the Hills Blue Orange, London 2005. http://www.facebook.com/richard.rathwell
John Rippey
John Rippey is a native of the U.S. and has lived most of his adult life in Japan. He is Professor in the Department of Intercultural Communications, School of Human Cultures, The University of Shiga Prefecture (from April, 2013). He received a B.A. in American History and Literature from Harvard University (1984), an M.F.A. from New England College (2005), where he translated work of Japanese poet Hagiwara Sakutarō into English, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Lancaster University (2013), where he studied under the poet Paul Farley. John’s poetry has been described as a space where East and West coalesce, characteristically fusing Japanese visual aesthetics with English formality. His research takes up transcultural dimensions to creative writing, as well. Recently, he has explored nature, landscape, and environmental writing from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. John has also presented and published widely on the use of creative writing in English (as a foreign language) education and has edited several volumes of student creative writing. http://www.usp.ac.jp/english/index.html
Sundar Kanta Walker
Sundar was born in a village in East Punjab, India. There was no provision for education for girls, so she never attended a school or college until she joined Nottingham University aged 18. She married into a Scottish family and came to live in Manchester, working with Pakistani communities, doing grassroots work. She developed an Asian women’s Sewing Co-operative and an Asian Women’s Refuge, ASRA. She worked for the Manchester Education Committee as a district co-ordinator for community education and then an assistant principal to serve the voluntary sector. Her last post was as the head of Chorlton Park Community Education Centre. After taking early retirement she developed a painting studio in the Lake District and also has a base in Manchester. She has written poetry, short stories and fiction. Her first novel Sare Mare was written at the age of 23 but only brought out in 1989. http://www.artsk.co.uk/about.htm
Harry Whitehead
Harry Whitehead is a novelist and lectures in creative writing at the University of Leicester. Born in London, he grew up in the home his mother founded and ran for disturbed children. He spent his early twenties in the Far East before coming back to do a degree in anthropology at Sussex and then an MSc in medical anthropology at University College London. He worked for many years in the film business as a location scout and manager. At the same time, he studied for an MA in creative writing at Birkbeck and then a PhD at Lancaster University, teaching and writing when he could. His first novel, The Cannibal Spirit, was published by Penguin Canada in 2011. Harry’s first novel, The Cannibal Spirit, is set in 1900 in British Columbia, Canada, and is a fictionalization of the true story of a First Nations man who was tried for cannibalism. His research and writing interests continue to be drawn from the subject of anthropology, although his second novel, Nowhere, will have as its subjects 21st century Britain, Psychogeography, sex and insanity. He is also interested in all forms of creative writing theory and pedagogy, its history as a subject and its inexorable global spread. http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/people/harrywhitehead