My interests concern the creative, moral and emotional relation of writing and reading to living. That means: writing and memory; literature and belief; drama and mind. I want The Reader to be a magazine at the heart of such concerns - using all sorts of experience - poetry, prose fiction, thought pieces, interviews, readers' memories - to help people find a holding-ground for personal thinking, a place in themselves for individual meditation on the purposes of life.  

I was born in Leeds in 1953 though brought up mainly in Nottingham. My teacher at secondary school was the Nottingham novelist, Stanley Middleton. Knowing him made me think more and more about the human relation between the man whom I knew and the writer he also was. I went on to Cambridge to study English in 1972, where I completed my Ph.D on Memory and Writing at Girton College, and then went on to my first teaching post as a lecturer in Liverpool. I thought I would stay for about four or five years but actually never left. It was partly because I was unfashionable; partly because Jane Davis and I were raising a family.

I wholly believe in the idea of a university education in literature but am sometimes dismayed by its conventional tame reality. I am particularly interested in all that goes into the act of reading, all that is involved in thinking, feeling, remembering and imagining through books. It is also why I wanted to write a life of a writer - Bernard Malamud - to see all that went into the act of writing in relation to a life. It pleases me that so many of the people working on the 'Get Into Reading' project are graduates of the part-time Victorian M.A. which I ran with Brian Nellist from 1986 to 2000.

Alongside The Reader and working in my current role as the Head of the School of Music at the University of Liverpool, I am running another part-time M.A. - Reading in Practice - which is the first of its kind in the country, dealing with literature and bibliotherapy. From this we expect further graduates who will work in The Reader Organisation on its outreach mission. I am pursuing research into the effect of Shakespeare on the brain in collaboration with MARIARC, the brain-imaging centre at the University of Liverpool, and plan to carry out further research on bibliotherapy and the practical work that The Reader Organisation is doing in relation to reading and health - in the broadest sense of that word.