Nicholas Royle
Nicholas Royle is a novelist, critic and public speaker. He has lectured and given readings in many countries around the world.
He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Sussex, where he taught from 1999 to 2022, and established the MA and PhD programme in Creative and Critical Writing. He has also taught at the Universities of Oxford, Tampere and Stirling, and been a visiting professor at the Universities of Santiago del Compostela, Aarhus, Turku, Manitoba, and Lille.
His work has been notably influential in the fields of creative and critical writing, especially in combining autobiography and fiction, as in David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine (2023).
He is the author of three novels, Quilt (2010), An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017) and Detective Novel (forthcoming), as well as Mother: A Memoir (2020).
His longstanding interests in literature and magical thinking, dream and wordplay, strangeness, chance and the unexpected are evidenced in a series of critical works: Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (1990), The Uncanny (2003), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), and The Weird, the Uncanny and the New Fantastic (2026).
Other books include studies of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Shakespeare. He is co-author (with Andrew Bennett) of two highly successful textbooks, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (sixth edition, 2023) and This Thing Called Literature (second edition, 2024).
Nick is a member of the Hard Art collective. He curated and directed the inaugural Hey! Festival in Newhaven, East Sussex in 2025.
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Photo of Nicholas Royle © Candida Lacey