Gareth Gavin

I joined the Centre for New Writing at Manchester in 2017, having previously taught at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex. I completed my AHRC-funded PhD in 2011, within the cross-disciplinary programme of the London Consortium at Birkbeck, University of London. My work moves between fiction, theory, and forms of creative criticism. Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize, and Never Was: A Novel Without a World (Cipher Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. I also write short fiction; a story called 'Home Death' was longlisted for the 2019/20 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, and in 2021 The Aleph Press published a two-part collection of some of my fiction, Funny Queer. My earlier literary critical work explored the encounter between literature and silent film: my monograph on this subject was completed during a post-doctoral Fellowship at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry between 2012 and 2014.

I teach on UG modules in creative writing (fiction) and the MA module Key Issues in Literary and Critical Theory. Since September 2023, I have been contributing to the MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture by teaching a new module on 'Trans Theory', which includes the option of a creative final assessment for those with a background in creative practice. 

Funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, my current creative project examines trans desires for ordinariness through a reevaluation of the political affordances of literary realism. Set across the transformed and transforming urban landscapes of east Manchester, central Crewe, and the periphery of Liverpool, the prosaic plainness of the novel, though undoubtedly an artifice, nonetheless expresses a formal sympathy with the protagonist’s longing for his masculinity to be read as unremarkable and mundane; realism here functions both as a figure for this desire and a means of modeling its realisability, which also entails probing its limits and ambivalences. By simultaneously staging a reckoning with the ways in which the texture of the protagonist’s masculinity is not wholly his own – is, that is, also social and historical, a form of comportment that bears a relation to the habits of the body demanded by capital – the project attempts a reframing of the relationship between individual transition and social change, aiming to intervene, as well, in current critical debates around trans ‘normativity’. More loosely, the project continues my ongoing creative interest in urban history by developing into a social commentary on the uneven legacy of the relocation of inner city communities by way of ‘overspill’ estates and towns. 

My first novel, Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014), explored the twentieth-century transformations of the city of Birmingham, UK, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize, which rewards writing that "demonstrates innovative literary methods" and challenges percieved notions of genre. Research for Midland was supported by a grant from the Canadian Centre for Architecture. My general interest in the relationship between writing and space is also evident in the workshop and accompanying book I developed and co-edited with Adam Kaasa: Uncommon Building (Spirit Duplicator, 2017) documents a collaborative exercise in speculative fiction as a methodology for thinking critically and across disciplines about site, setting, architecture and the urban. 

My creative work both informs and is informed by my critical and theoretical writing, which includes a monograph on the encounter between literature and silent film in the early twentieth century titled Literature and Film, Dispositioned: Thought, Location, World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The latter is also a reflection on the trajectory of free indirect style, or represented thought, across modernism. The project began as my PhD and was re-worked during a Fellowship at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry between 2012 and 2014. I am often interested in work that moves between creativity and criticism: an essay on femininity and transmasculinity, 'The Girl I Left Behind Me', takes a ghost story by Muriel Spark as its title and subject; my creative re-writing of Ursula Le Guin's 'Paradises Lost' was published in the Architectural Review.

Collaboration is a key element of my cross-disciplinary work. I contributed a short text on masculinity and conspirary theories ('The Image Has Now Started') to Richard Whitby's The Jump Room project, an essay on referentiality and the 2011 UK riots or uprisings to Judy Radul's This Is Television, and worked with Stuart Whipps on a  commission in response and accompaniment to a film about British New Towns.