Dr Liam Harrison

• Qualifications:Ph.D. (University of Birmingham), M.Phil. (Trinity College Dublin), B.A. (University of Sussex)
• Position:Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing
• Department:ACE - Creative and Cultural Industries College of Arts, Technology and Environment
• Telephone:+441173282667
• Email:Liam.Harrison@uwe.ac.uk
• Social media:

About me

I am a Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at UWE, Bristol.

I am a founding editor of the non-fiction literary journal Tolka, a Dublin-based journal of ‘formally promiscuous’ non-fiction. Tolka publishes new and emerging writers as well as some of the most pre-eminent writers working today, such as Annie Ernaux, Claire-Louise Bennett, Max Porter and Mark O’Connell. Tolka is funded by the Irish Arts Council, and plays a significant role in the thriving Irish literary scene. I co-host The Tolka Podcast, which allows writers from the journal to share their work with a wider audience. I also regularly interview authors for Tolka, including Colin Barrett, Isabel Waidner, and Rob Doyle.

As a Senior Lecturer, I have substantial teaching experience across both English Literature and Creative Writing, including literature modules spanning modernism to the contemporary, and Creative Writing modules including fiction, creative non-fiction, cultural criticism, poetry, commercial writing, and my specialist third-year module on publishing. My third-year publishing module at UWE produces the student-run literary magazine, Nova, which is available to read here.

Area of expertise

My academic research spans modernist legacies in contemporary literature, publishing culture and literary magazines, and contemporary British and Irish literature, and has been widely published. In 2024 I co-edited Rachel Cusk: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury) alongside Dr Roberta Garrett, contributing a chapter on experimental forms of non-fiction and life writing, and co-writing the introduction. An extract from the introduction was published in The Irish Times in November 2024, which you can read here. In 2024 I also published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Irish Writing, analysing the cultural and industry impact of literary journals in the recent boom of contemporary Irish literature. My research has also been published in Textual Practice, Irish Studies Review, and C21.

In 2022 I completed a PhD researching modernist legacies in twenty-first century British and Irish fiction at the University of Birmingham. My PhD explored modernist legacies and late styles in the work of Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack, Zadie Smith, Rachel Cusk and Claire-Louise Bennett. My creative and critical writing has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, and 3AM Magazine, and many other publications.

I am a co-founder of the Contemporary Irish Literature Research Network, and I sit on the executive board of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS). I have previously worked in publishing in Dublin.

I am open to enquiries about doctoral supervision, and I am particularly interested in supervising PhDs which relate to contemporary British and Irish literature, publishing culture, modernist legacies, and experimental non-fiction.

Publications

Publications loading...