David Bishop @ AWP 2013 in Boston this week

Edinburgh Napier MA Creative Writing lecturer David Bishop is going to Boston this week for the 2013 AWP  conference. He will be representing our course at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs' annual gathering, talking about its unique focus on genre fiction, and discussing how we've replaced the traditional workshop with a new and innovative approach to teaching.

Anyone attending the conference who wants to discover more about our acclaimed MA program can email David - d.bishop@napier.ac.uk - to arrange a chat while he's in Boston. Or find him via Twitter - @davidbishop. Or Facebook. Or you can wander the event, searching for his distinctive black and white checkered winklepicker shoes [see photo, below left].

UPDATE: David will be helping at booth #214 - Bookfair Plaza Level, Exhibit Hall A - from 10am until noon on Friday March 8th, that's the NAWE stand [National Association of Writers in Education (UK)]. Come and ask him about the modules he teaches in writing graphic novels or writing fantasy, horror, crime and science fiction on our Creative Writing program.

The Times newspaper in London calls our course "a radical departure" in creative writing. Since launching in 2009 the program has attracted students from the United States, not to mention Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Finland, Italy. Edinburgh Napier is still taking applications for the 2013/14 academic year, and we've already offered places to several US students.

If you're not going to be at AWP in Chicago, you can find out more about our course by checking the links on the right hand side of this blog. Depending on which version of the course will best suit your needs as a student, click either full-time or part-time to apply.

Writer in residence up for BSFA best novel

Congratulations to Ken MacLeod - writer in residence on the Edinburgh Napier Creative Writing MA - whose most recent novel has been shortlisted for the 2012 British Science Fiction Awards.

Intrusion is one of five books nominated in the Best Novel category, alongside Dark Eden by Chris Beckett, Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison, Jack Glass by Adam Roberts, and 2312 by Kim Stanley-Robinson.

Organised by the British Science Fiction Association, the prestigious BSFA Awards have been running for more than 50 years. The winners will be announced at the 2013 Eastercon in Bradford at the end of March.

Ken has previously won the BSFA best novel award for The Sky Road (1999) and The Night Sessions (2008), along with many other accolades.

Reader in residence becomes Booker Prize judge

Stuart Kelly • photograph © Chris Scott, www.chrisdonia.co.uk

The Edinburgh Napier MA Creative Writing programme's reader in residence, Stuart Kelly, is one of five judges for the 2013 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

The Booker is one of the famous and prestigious literary prizes, with the judges' choice attracting worldwide attention. Next year will be the 45th year for the £50,000 prize. It was won in 2012 by Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies.

The other judges are BBC broadcaster Martha Kearney; biographer and critic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst; author, broadcaster and classicist Natalie Haynes; with award-winning author Robert Macfarlane as chair.

Stuart Kelly has been reader in residence for the MA programme since it launched in 2009. His unique role includes devising personalised reading lists for students and offering research advice.

A former literary editor of Scotland on Sunday and guest curator for the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Stuart is author of The Book Of Lost Books: An Incomplete Guide To All The Books You'll Never Read and Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented A Nation.

The MA Creative Writing programme congratulates Stuart on his exciting new role as a Booker Prize judge, even if it means we might see a little less of him over the coming months...

More success for MA students and alumni

Students and alumni from Edinburgh Napier's MA Creative Writing programme are breaking new ground in the literary world. A new arrival has just won a national contest, while a recent graduate has been selected for a prestigious mentoring scheme.

Catherine Simpson only graduated from the course in September, but has certainly been keeping busy. She's among 39 writers shortlisted from more than 700 for the Asham Award, a short story contest that publishes the top twelve entries alongside established authors in an anthology.

It's just been announced that Catherine is one of ten people receiving a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust [SBT]. She will get a grant of £2000, mentoring with an experienced author and much more. Catherine's the first graduate from our course to receive this much-prized award.

"I feel like Cinderella after her fairy godmother turned up," Catherine told the SBT website. "It's wonderful to know I'll be supported for the next year and the writing life will be a less lonely place."

Anni Telford only joined the course in September as a first-year part-timer but her writing is already gaining plaudits. Her flash fiction, The Pauli Exclusion Principle, won the Stork Press Mini Short Story Competition. You can read her winning entry here.

The abstract Christmas story was Anni's first contest submission since starting the MA. "It's only wee, but fingers crossed may be the first of many," she said on course Facebook page. "Huge thanks to Sam [Kelly, the MA programme leader], her advice on the edit was superb."

MA Creative Writing: ...hello Merchiston

 

Today the MA Creative Writing programme at Edinburgh Napier University moved into its new home at the Merchiston campus. Above you can see D68 - the shared office of programme leader Sam Kelly and part-time lecturer David Bishop - waiting to be unpacked. Below, all the crates.

Below, the office ready for action. Under that, Sam gives writer-in-residence Ken McLeoda tour of the new accommodations. At the very bottom, the view out the office window of historic Napier Tower which stands in the middle of the Merchiston campus...

MA Creative Writing: Goodbye Craighouse...

Today was the MA Creative Writing programme's last at the Craighouse campus of Edinburgh Napier University, so I took some photos of rooms we were vacating. [Above is my office, below are two views of the Writers' Room and beneath them is the office of programme leader Sam Kelly.]

Hard to believe it's four years since Sam and I were hired to invent the programme, get it validated, market the course to prospective students and open our doors to the first cohort - all in 2009. Since then we've taught three full-time cohorts and two part-time cohorts.

Come Monday we'll be based at the Merchiston campus, in refurbished digs. It'll take us a while to get used to the new digs, no doubt, but change is a constant so we'll be embracing that. In the meantime, it's a fond farewell to Craighouse. You served us well...

Student and alumni success stories

We're pleased to applaud successes by several of our students and recent alumni - in fact, we're having trouble keeping up with them on this blog.

Second-year part-timer Frances Hider has been rubbing shoulders in print with Liz Lochhead, Alisdair Gray, Alexander McCall Smith and our first writer-in-residence, James Robertson. All of them have contributed to My Favourite Place, a project by BBC Radio Scotland and the Scottish Book Trust celebrating beloved locations in Scotland.

Frances Hider reads at the West Port Book Festival, photo © chrisdonia

Frances had her piece about Edinburgh's Waverley Railway Station selected from hundreds of entries for inclusion in the book. She gave a reading of it during the West Port Book Festival and even found herself giving an impromptu Q&A about the project. Frances developed the piece through her mentoring sessions on the MA course - you can read it for yourself here.

Recent alumni Barbara Melville is the new writer-in-residence at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, a world leading research centre in Edinburgh that studies stem cells, disease and tissue repair to advance human health and acts as a centre for public engagement.

"I'll be there three days a week," Barbara says, "writing, researching and reflecting on my own work. I'l l also be participating in creative outreach projects to help communicate science to the general public."

Recent graduate Laura Denham made her print fiction debut in Scottish magazine Octavius with a short story written in our Genre Fiction module. Reviewer Calathumpian says Laura's story Mockingbird "gets under the very skin of its reader, creating a dreamscape of damp unease that perturbed me for hours after", while Scots Whay Hae! describes it as "rich as anything I've read this year".