As of April 2026 the Bloomsbury Literary Studies & Creative Writing Blog is archived and no longer updated. We are no longer accepting new blog posts. On the Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog, we love to feature guest posts from our authors to help convey the impressive depth of research and knowledge contained within each of… Read More »
Guest post by Hadas Elber-Aviram For over a century and a half, London has remained the foremost city of urban fantasy. No city in the history of Anglophone fantasy literature has approached its ubiquity. As John Clute points out, even New York is ‘a fairly distant second’. This unrivalled predominance of London begs the question… Read More »
Michael Richardson answered a few questions for us about his new book, Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature. How would you describe your book in one sentence? Gestures of Testimony argues that writing torture and its traumas in fiction requires re-thinking the relationship between state power, tortured and torturing bodies, and literary… Read More »
It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set… Read More »
Michael Mack, author of How Literature Changes the Way We Think, starts off the new READ: Research in English at Durham podcast series discussing how literature changes the way we think about ageing. "Michael Mack, author of How Literature Changes the Way We Think, explains how literature can help us to respond to the changing demographic… Read More »
John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster and author of our new fictional narrative The Late Walter Benjamin. 'Set partly in Watford and partly in the haunted wing of the English language' (Ian Macmillan, on BBC Radio 3's 'The Verb'), this documentary novel juxtaposes the life and death of Walter… Read More »
As mentioned previously, we're really excited to be publishing The Late Walter Benjamin this week! On Monday John Schad (the author) gave us an insight into his experience of writing about Walter Benjamin, and today I'm delighted to bring you the first couple of chapters of the book to read, for free, exclusively on our… Read More »
This week we publish The Late Walter Benjamin, a documentary novel that creatively explores the life and thought of Walter Benjamin in the political context of a post-War London estate. In this blog post, our author John Schad looks back on his personal engagement with Walter Benjamin and how it influenced and inspired the book.… Read More »
