University news

Novelist Patricia Duncker is to give a free public reading at the University of Glasgow at 5.30pm on Tuesday 24 February in Lecture Theatre room T415, 4th Floor Adam Smith Building (access via Great George Street or University Gardens).

Patricia Duncker was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She attended school in England and, after a period spent working in Germany, she read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied for a D.Phil. in English and German Romanticism at St Hugh's College, Oxford. From 1993-2002, she taught Literature at the University of Aberystwyth, and from 2002-2006, has been Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, teaching the MA in Prose Fiction. In January 2007, she moved to the University of Manchester as Professor of Modern Literature.

Her first novel, the acclaimed Hallucinating Foucault (1996), won the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize. Set mainly in France, the narrative centres on a PhD student's obsessive search for his subject, the (fictional) French writer Paul Michel. Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees, a collection of short stories exploring themes of desire, jealousy and revenge, was published in 1997 and was shortlisted for the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. James Miranda Barry (1999) is a fictional account of the life of colonial doctor, transvestite, duelist and socialite Barry (1795-1865).

Her third novel, The Deadly Space Between (2002), is a disturbing psychological thriller about 18-year-old Toby Hawk and his mother's enigmatic new lover. A collection of provocative stories, Seven Tales of Sex and Death, was published in 2003. Her fourth novel, Miss Webster and Chérif (Bloomsbury, 2006) is a comedy of errors set in the post 9/11 world with an indomitable leading character; it was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2007.

All her work has been widely translated. Her critical work includes Sisters and Strangers: An Introduction to Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Blackwell, 1992) and a collection of essays on writing and contemporary literature, Writing on the Wall: Selected Essays (Rivers Oram, 2002) and she has published many literary essays and scholarly articles.  She works as an editor for Honno, the Welsh Women’s Press, and has co-edited, with Janet Thomas, several collections of short fiction, the most recent of which is Safe World Gone (2007).

Admission is free to the lecture and all are welcome to attend. A collection towards the Creative Writing Scholarships fund will be held after the event.

Further information:
Martin Shannon, Media Relations Officer
University of Glasgow Tel: 0141 330 8593

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First published: 27 January 2009