Professor

Maggie Gee

Personal Statement

Maggie Gee has written thirteen acclaimed novels, including The Ice People, My Cleaner, My Driver and The White Family, a collection of short stories, The Blue, and a memoir of her life as a writer, My Animal Life (2010).

Her latest novel, Blood (2019), is a black comedy about parricide set in a disturbed, chaotic Brexit Britain. Her most recent publication was a 9,000-word short story, May Hobbs, in the anthology Protest: Stories of Resistance (2017).

Maggie has judged many prizes including the Booker and has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the International Impac award. Maggie was the first female Chair of Council of the Royal Society of Literature, 2004-2008, and is now a Vice-President. An international conference about her writing was held at St Andrew's University in August 2012. An associated collection of essays on her work was published by Gylphi in 2014.

Maggie Gee's books have been translated into 14 languages including Chinese. The first book-length study of her work, Mine Ozyrt Kilic's Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition of England Novel, was published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Academic. She has held writing fellowships at many universities including Sussex and UEA and was Visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam University before becoming Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa.

Maggie has represented authors on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, the Government Public Lending Right Committee and other bodies; she teaches regularly for the Arvon Foundation and Spread the Word and was from 2011- 2014 one of the fiction course directors at Faber Academy. She has travelled widely for the British Council, for whom she also co-edited an anthology, New Writing 15, in 2006, with Bernardine Evaristo. In 2012 she was awarded the OBE for services to literature.

Maggie's research interests include nature-writing, Virginia Woolf, science-writing and in particular evolutionary biology and the work of WD Hamilton, black British writing and writing from Africa and the African diaspora, and the visual arts. In several of her novels a painting is a key image and plot motif.

Maggie was educated at state schools, won an Open Scholarship to Somerville College Oxford and there did an MA in English Literature and an M Litt on Surrealism in England. She worked in publishing for two years before becoming a Research Assistant at Wolverhampton Polytechnic where she completed a PhD in The Self-Conscious Novel from Sterne to Vonnegut. She was one of the original Granta 20 Best of Young British Novelists.

She is currently the academic lead for Bath Spa's Empathy and Writing research group. 

Academic qualifications

• BA - Oxford
• MA - Oxford
• M.Litt - Oxford
• PhD - Wolverhampton Polytechnic.

Professional qualifications

• Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL)
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FEA)

Other external roles

• Vice-President - Royal Society of Literature
• Director - Author's Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS)

Teaching specialism

• 20th and 21st-century fiction
• Creative non-fiction