Contact Details

Tel: +44 (0)1243 816297
Email: a.macleod@chi.ac.uk

Professor of Contemporary Fiction

I joined the English Department in 1990. Since then, I have contributed to an exciting range of modules, work which has taken me from the fulsome Victorian novels of Hardy, Eliot and the Brontes to the lean postmodern thrillers of Auster and Ackroyd. I've explored the Gothic creations of Edgar Allan Poe and the 'new' Gothic' of writers like Patrick McGrath, Ian McEwan and A.M. Homes. I enjoy the Modernist experiments of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, as well as the flamboyance and craft of writers like Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. I am also keenly interested in 21st-century fiction and its developments.

I now teach primarily on the creative writing programme within English Studies. My speciality is fiction, though, like all my colleagues in creative writing at the University, I teach across a range of genres and find the diversity of our modules rewarding. It's a programme of which I am proud to be a part. At Chichester, we have been running creative writing modules at the BA level for almost thirty years, and have, in the process, established a strong reputation in the area, as well as a genuine community of writers.

I am also one of the team of writers who deliver Chichester 's MA in Creative Writing, co-teaching the module, 'Metaphor & the Imagination'. Over the years, the commendations of our students and examiners have been important to our team. It is also gratifying to see many of our students going on to publish work that has been conceived and honed in our MA seminars and workshops.

RESEARCH SUPERVISION: I welcome queries from potential Ph.D. students. My research specialisms include the short story, contemporary fiction, 'history into fiction', post-modern and millennial fiction, 'science and fiction', the fantastic, the carnivalesque (via Bakhtin), modern Gothic, 'the uncanny', and theories of the creative process.

Main Publications

'Alison MacLeod’s collection is a baker’s dozen of excellence book-ended by brilliance... MacLeod’s stories detail the wayward flickerings of desire with settings from, among others, the bleak twilight world of IKEA, coastal Nova Scotia and the wistful seediness of Brighton... "Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction" is a potent and heady mix. Avoiding the perils of both overt erudition and sentimental whimsy, the whole is ably piloted by MacLeod’s total control of her material. Highly recommended. ' Time Out (London)

'Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create
intimate worlds... and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling.' Helen Dunmore, novelist, poet

'MacLeod's fictions are modern indeed. They are fragmentary evocations of desire and its mysteries, passing glimpses into minds and hearts: tender; pierced; translucent.... [Her] characters are strong, and they are worth listening to...' The Guardian

'Beautifully crafted, they range from brilliantly observed humour - customers stampeding in Ikea at the store's launch in Notes for a Chaotic Century - to the haunting and heart-rending - the tender elegy to a middle-aged love affair in Dirty Weekend. Immensely readable.' The Big Issue

Novels

The Wave Theory of Angels (Hamish Hamilton 2005/ Penguin Canada 2005/Penguin UK 2006)

'MacLeod's novel ingeniously combines medieval theology with 21st-century physics... Parallels are drawn between the medieval and modern worlds, and even the religious fanaticism of the former is echoed in the American episodes. A cathedral tower falls in one story, the twin towers in the other, without seeming glib or contrived....'' The Times

The Wave Theory of Angels is a bold and beautiful dismantling of the linearity and fixedness of time and space… [MacLeod] has achieved an enchanting, playful and, at times, dark probing of the limits of our knowledge. It's a novel that leaves us wondering if we will not forever continue to uncover further ranks of angels, other dimensions of time and space. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

The Changeling (Macmillan 1996/St.Martin's Press 1997) 'Alison MacLeod has written a stunning novel. She has wrought characters who charm, beguile and refuse well-trodden paths. This is a wonderful tale, beautifully written and yet steeped in the myth that it deservedly explodes.' New Statesman & Society

'This eighteenth-century, gender-bending pirate story - part fact, part fantasy, but all of it fantastic - also honks of history, with an authenticity of language and geography that captures completely the unfolding landscape of the new world. Its breadth is vast, its structure flawless.' Time Out.

Recent stories appear in, for example, Waving at the Gardener: the Asham Prize Collection (Bloomsbury, 2009), The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease (Comma Press, 2008), The Brighton Moment (2008) and Matter Magazine (2009).