Author, translator, editor and novelist Susan Sellers is to give a free public reading at the University of Glasgow at 5.30pm on Tuesday 21 April in Lecture Theatre room T415, 4th Floor Adam Smith Building (access via Great George Street or University Gardens).

After a nomadic childhood, Susan Sellers ran away to Paris . Renting a chambre de bonne, she worked as a barmaid, tour-guide and nanny, bluffed her way as a software translator and co-wrote a film script with a Hollywood screenwriter. She became closely involved with leading French feminist writers and translated Hélène Cixous. From Paris she travelled to Swaziland, teaching English to tribal grandmothers, and to Peru , where she worked for a women’s aid agency.

She is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of St Andrews . In 2002 she won the Canongate Prize for Short Story Writing and in 2007 received a New Writing Partnership Arts Council Award for Vanessa and Virginia (Two Ravens, 2008 and Harcourt, New York ).

Susan Sellers' work has been orientated towards women's writing. Her Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women's Fiction (Palgrave, 2001) is an investigation into the ongoing resonance of myth and fairy tale for contemporary women's fiction.

Sellers' interest in the writings of Virginia Woolf has led to her involvement in the Cambridge University Press edition of Woolf's writings, which she co-directs with Jane Goldman. Goldman and Sellers received a major Arts and Humanities Research Council Award in 2005 for this project.

Throughout, Sellers has been particularly interested in the creative process of writing, and this is reflected in three collections Instead of Full Stops (The Women’s Press, 1996), Taking Reality by Surprise (The Women's Press, 1991), and Delighting the Heart: A Notebook by Women Writers (The Women's Press, 1988), as well as in the translated selections from The Writing Notebooks of Hélène Cixous (Continuum, 2004).

Admission is free to the lecture and all are welcome to attend. A collection towards the Creative Writing Scholarships fund will be held after the event.

Further information:
Martin Shannon, Media Relations Officer
University of Glasgow Tel: 0141 330 8593

 

First published: 27 January 2009

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