World Writers & Filmmakers

Günter Grass

Germany’s foremost Nobel laureate, as controversial for his public opinions as for his literary writing

• Rebecca Braun

Michel Houellebecq

A contemporary French writer who has been translated into more than 30 languages and whose work depict the ills of contemporary consumer society and globalization. 

• Delphine Grass

Elfriede Jelinek

A thorn in Austria's side, this Nobel laureate is a fierce and witty political commentator, keeping a keen watch in extreme right-wing politics, in particular.

• Rebecca Braun
• Allyson Fiddler

Amélie Nothomb

The best known, most prolific and most read Francophone Belgian novelist obsessed with Japan and writing.

• Erika Fülöp

Marcel Proust

Author of the colossal In Search of Lost Time, considered the last novel of the 19th century and the first one of the 20th.

• Erika Fülöp

Juan Rulfo

Rulfo was one of Mexico’s most internationally respected and celebrated fiction writers; his photography has now travelled worldwide to equally great critical acclaim.

• Amit Thakkar

Williams Sassine

An influential Francophone Guinean novelist, playwright and journalist, whose body of work defies convention and is characterised by a specifically Sassinian mode of thought and writing.

• Charlotte Baker

Ha Jin

A self-styled ‘migrant writer’ and ‘outcast’, China-born US-based Ha Jin writes award-winning English-language fiction and poetry that destabilises linguistic, cultural and national identities.  

Derek Hird

Writing Life

This project gathers together a series of publications on contemporary writing in German-speaking Europe. Collectively, they enhance existing theories of authorship by reflecting on the impact of the media and media constructions on writer's views of themselves and on the aesthetic nature and social function of their writing. They present German cultural output within the globalized world of the media and literary celebrity, and reflect on the interconnections between the regional and the global literary market place.

• Rebecca Braun

The West African Dictator Novel

This book project explores the way in which Anglophone and Francophone African writers have engaged with and subverted the power of the dictator in post-independence West Africa.

• Charlotte Baker

Narratives Against Reason

This monograph project examines the potential of narrative fiction to challenge the limits or ‘reason’ – that is, of classical logic – by presenting us with paradoxical structures. While philosophers did not substantially question the validity of the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction until the 20^th century, fiction has been much more daring from Cervantes on in inviting us to think differently, Today, some logicians give reason to fiction, which turns out to provide access to a way of thinking we had never thought was possible and valid.

• Erika Fülöp

Resisting Haiderisation

There have been many forms of cultural resistance to right-wing populism in Austria. When Jörg Haider's 'liberal' party formed part of a coalition government in 2000, the EU reacted with sanctions. This study looks at the novels, films, plays, etc. that followed.

• Allyson Fiddler

Political Performances

This project takes a comparative view of recent contrasting cultural vehicles for socio-political protest: first, the recent phenomenon of ‘pop-feminism’ and pop-feminist writing across the United States, Britain, and Germany. A complex contemporary feminist discourse exploring the question of how women go about establishing selfhood and agency in a postfeminist neoliberal climate, pop-feminism is finding expression in popular feminist guides, as well as in complex autofictions and literary blogging online. The project also investigates performance poetry as a contemporary ‘world literary’ phenomenon and its potential for modelling future possibilities in literary led creative practices and their ability to address pressing social issues. 

• Emily Spiers