De Montfort University

Faculty Member, English and Creative Writing

Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing

About

I am a writer of fiction, philosophy and children's books with a background in Fine Arts/Art History, Anthropology and Philosophy.

My philosophy book "Finding our Sea-Legs" is published by Kingston University Press. More recently, I've had the two chapters on contemporary and 20th century philosophy published in Dorling Kindersley's "The Philosophy Book", and there's a chapter on coffee, phenomenology and the ethics of idleness coming out in the Blackwell/Wiley "Coffee: Grounds for Debate".

I'm working on several projects at the moment. Here's a list:

* a (fairly popular, or at least populist) philosophy book about naturalism, matter and meaning, drawing on Chinese philosophy, Epicureanism, and more recent work in the sciences.

* a novel on banditry and music in 19th Century Bulgaria - currently with my agent, who is looking for a publisher for the book

* a further novel that draws on Chinese traditions of storytelling, for which I'm headed to China in the summer 2010 to do some research

* a children's book called "The Snorgh and the Sailor", about a small, gloomy marsh-dweller, to be published by Scholastic in 2012.

My current research interests include: human meaning and practices of flourishing in the light of the sciences, phenomenology, ethics, Emmanuel Levinas, early Chinese thought.

I teach creative writing at De Montfort University, Leicester.

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