Dr Nigel McLoughlin

  • Job title: Reader in Creative Writing
  • Organisation: University of Gloucestershire
  • Email: N McLoughlin

National Teaching Fellow 2011

 

Nigel McLoughlin is a prize-winning poet with five full collections in print, the latest of which is Chora: New & Selected Poems (Templar Poetry, 2009). He has published widely in prestigious literary journals and has been invited to read his work at major literary festivals in the UK and abroad. He is Editor of Iota, a poetry journal of established national reputation and Editor of Creative Writing: Teaching Theory and Practice, a journal devoted to the theory and practice of Creative Writing pedagogy which emerged out of a successful English Subject Centre funded project. He is Vice-Chair of the National Association of Writers in Education and he was a member of the working group that drafted the Subject Benchmark and Research Statements for Creative Writing in 2008.

Nigel has pioneered innovative course design in Creative Writing programmes that enable students to engage in practice-led research in their chosen genre while also encouraging them to develop as researchers into creativity and pedagogy. His teaching combines a craft-centred approach with active learning exercises that empower the students to see themselves as writers right from the start. His teaching has been widely praised by his students and many have echoed the view that ‘Nigel is an excellent example for the rest of the teaching community because of his passion for learning, his keen mind, and most importantly for his willingness to go that extra mile for his students’.  Many of his students have gone on to publish regularly in journals, to have collections of work published, and to win competitions in creative writing.

Nigel was awarded a University Teaching Fellowship in 2009 and funding for a project designed to enable MA students to focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning in creative writing and to support them in delivering papers at conferences, which successfully concluded in 2010. He is co-editing a special edition of TEXT: The Journal of Writers and Writing Courses, focusing on the cognitive, social and cultural perspectives of creativity, to be published in 2012.