James Friel

James Friel is the author of The Posthumous Affair, The Higher Realm, Left of North, Taking the Veil and Careless Talk.

He has dramatised works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Iris Murdoch, Balzac, David Hare, and Faulkner, as well as Charlotte Bronte’s Villette and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow for BBC Radio 3 and 4.

His shorter fiction has been published internationally, and his work has been awarded a Betty Trask prize, an Authors’ Foundation grant, arts council bursaries and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize.

He was programme leader for the MA in Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. He was also an external examiner at the universities of East Anglia and Greenwich, and he has validated university programmes and examined PhD students.

He has been the visiting writer at l’Université de Rouen, pioneering the teaching of creative writing in France and, since 1992, he has tutored many courses for the Arvon Foundation, Tŷ Newydd, and the Art of Writing courses in Italy.

He is greatly interested in working with writers in many genres and in fostering research across the university curriculum, developing links between subject areas because very little creative writing is concerned with its own nature but is, more often, founded in giving expression to other areas of knowledge such as law, health, history, or criminology or indeed any of the arts and sciences.

He lives in Chester. Some friends think he should get himself a dog, others say a cat. Undecided, he believes that the right animal will come along and adopt him, which seems the better plan.

James Friel has authored five novels and dramatised works by Ishiguro, Iris Murdoch, Balzac, William Faulkner, Charlotte Bronte and Orhan Pamuk for BBC Radio 3 and 4. His shorter fiction has been published internationally, and his work awarded a Betty Trask prize, an Authors’ Foundation grant, Arts Council bursaries and been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. He was Programme Leader for the MA Writing at Liverpool John Moores University and external examiner at the universities of East Anglia and Greenwich. He has been the visiting writer at l’Université de Rouen and has tutored for the Arvon Foundation, Tŷ Newydd, and the Art of Writing courses in Italy.