About

I’m an English teacher and writer. Occasionally, I get some spare time.

I’m a member of NATE (the National Association for the Teaching of English) and a Fellow of the English Association. I’ve written for the British Library, the Poetry Archive and various other subject-related organisations. My work has been published in Teaching English, emagazine, The Use of English and a number of other publications.

I studied English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and later did a PGCE at Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD at the University of Nottingham. My thesis was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005 as the snappily-titled Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge, 1880-2003. With Gary Snapper and Andrew Green, I co-wrote Teaching English Literature 16-19 (Routledge/NATE, 2013) and the textbook for AQA’s A level English Literature B specification (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

I’m currently working on two further books. One, Someone Else’s Child, is a memoir about adoption; the other, All The Books You Read At School, is a nostalgic look at all those curriculum classics – A Kestrel for a Knave, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and so on – that you pored over for months back when you were a teenager. I’m represented by Charlotte Atyeo at CCLA.

Things I like: long walks, slow ploddy running, horse riding and red wine.