Lifelong Learning Dundee
The World Through Literature
Tutor Biographies; Winter Term 2018
Zoe Venditozzi No Great Mischief by Alistair Macleod 1st February
Zoe Venditozzi is a writer and teacher from North East Fife. Zoe’s first novel, Anywhere’s Better Than Here, won the popular vote in the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize and she has published stories and poems in various journals. Zoe is currently working on a new novel and a collection of short stories
Peggie Hughes Book to be confirmed 8th February
Eleanore Widger Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson 15th February
Eleanore is an AHRC funded PhD candidate at the University of Dundee. Her doctoral project looks at the influence of romantic aesthetics on representations of the environment in contemporary radical landscape poetry. She has recently published articles on innovative environmental poetries in English and The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. She has also recently completed an internship with public policy think-tank, Scotland’s Futures Forum, which examined the contribution of the Arts and Humanities research can make to environmental policy and understanding.
Ajay Close The Daughter of Lady Macbeth 22nd February
Ajay Close is a novelist, playwright and award-winning journalist. A Petrol Scented Spring, about the Scottish suffragettes imprisoned in Perth, was long listed for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Her fifth book, The Daughter of Lady Macbeth, came out earlier this year.
Esther Read Two Lives by William Trevor 1st March
For twenty years Esther Read taught on the ’Becoming a Writer’ and ‘Continuing as a Writer’ on the courses offered by the department of Continuing Education at The University of Dundee. In a career entirely lacking a plot, she has also been a freelance journalist, English teacher and agony aunt.
Rachel Marsh The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 8th March
Rachel Marsh is a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Surrey. The primary objective of her thesis is to investigate the creation of satire as a socio-political discourse, and understand how it sits separately from genre. Rachel has been published in literary anthologies, academic texts and as a journalist. She has been teaching literature and writing in the UK and the US for over fifteen years. As well as teaching with LLD she teaches at Perth College and will be leading workshops at various art festivals in England and Scotland.
Anna McFarlane Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 15th March
Anna McFarlane is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow researching science fiction and pregnancy. She is co-editor of Adam Roberts Critical Essays, A Practical Guide to the Resurrected: 21 short stories of science fiction and medicine, and blog editor of the journal BMJ Medical Humanities
Hazel Reid The Burial at Thebes (Play) By Seamus Heaney 22nd March
Hazel Reid’s special interest is in Scottish literature and poetry. She has worked for the Open University as an Associate Tutor since 1979 and despite massive changes in technology she continues to enjoy this role. She also teaches on some of the humanities courses and has very interesting times meeting students from a wide variety of backgrounds who have taught her so much over the years.
Alice Tarbuck We have always lived in the castle by Shirley Jackson 29th March
Alice Tarbuck is finishing her PhD on the poet and artist Thomas A Clark. She is interested in the relationship between innovative poetry and ecological disaster, and in the link between form and perception