Dr Ursula Hurley

Senior Lecturer, English and Creative Writing

• Crescent House 208
• T: 0161 295 2851
• E: u.k.hurley@salford.ac.uk
• SEEK: Research profile

Semester 2, 2012-13

Friday 10am – 12pm during teaching weeks

By appointment at other times

Ursula took a circuitous route to academia, having worked teaching English as a foreign language, in advertising, where she found herself mentoring other copy writers, and then in community engagement, where she helped others to express their needs and opinions. Eventually the penny dropped, and she realised that the power of language was her driving passion. Thus enlightened, she set up and ran the Writing Centre at Liverpool Hope University, winning a number of learning and teaching awards, before joining the Creative Writing team at Salford. Since then she has gained her Ph.D., become a prize-winning poet and prose writer, and continues to work in community engagement via the University's 'Writing Lives' project. She is now re-writing her Ph.D. thesis (which turned out to be three books in one) and hopes to publish it in the near future.

Module leader for Creative Practice and Working the Text

(year 1)

Module leader for Writing Fiction (years 2 and 3) and Creative Nonfiction (year 2)

Module leader for Writing Workshop (postgraduate)

I also contribute to the following team-taught modules:

Narrative, Fiction and the Novel (year 1)

Introduction to Poetry (year 1)

Popular Fictions (year 1)

Final Portfolio (year 3)

Literature in the Academic and Cultural World (postgraduate)

Experimental Writing (postgraduate)

Experimental prose, particularly hybrid and fictionalised memoirs. Composite narratives and short fictions. Gender and writing. Poetry concerned with place/environment. The pedagogy of creative writing. I am currently supervising PhDs  in experimental fictions and fictional autobiography within a diasporic context.

BA (Hons) English, St. John's College, University of  Cambridge. 

Postgraduate scholarship, Collegio Ghislieri, University of Pavia, Italy.

MA Writing Studies (Distinction), University of Lancaster.

Ph.D. 'Truths and Their Telling': A Novel with Complementary Discourses, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Member of the National Association of Writers in Education.

Member of the Biographers' Club.

2012, 'The Delicate One with Sugar', a collection of visual text on the Zimzalla website in response to Jo Langton's Poetea project: http://zimzalla.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/delicate.pdf

2012 'Standing on deep shale: the problem of originality', in: Beyond the Workshop, 1 edition, Kingston University Press, Kingston, UK, pp.85-104.

2011, 'Walking in the world of ruins : explorations in the processes and products of autobiographical fiction', International Journal of the Arts in Society, 5(6), pp.1-12.

2011, 'Look back in wonder: how the endings of short stories can be their most powerful and effective distinguishing features. ', Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, 1(1), pp.25-35.

2011, 'I Will Pick Flowers for You' in Best of the Manchester Poets volume 2, (Poem), Puppywolf, Manchester, UK.

2011, 'All the Love in the World' in Balancing Act and Other Poems, Leaf Books, Abercynon, UK.

2010 '1st Chapter of a Creative Non-Fiction Book: 1st Prize: Heartwood ', in: Loose Leaves Unbound Press Literary Competition Anthology Volume 1, Unbound Press, Glasgow, UK, pp.27-34.

2010, Two Poems, 'In Her Sun Porch' and 'Her Garden My Lure' in From Hepworth's Garden Out, Poems About Painters and St Ives ed. Rupert Loydell, (Poetry Anthology), Shearsman, Exeter, UK.