John McAuliffe
John McAuliffe was born in Ireland 1973. He has published four books with The Gallery Press, including Of All Places, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2011, and The Way In, joint winner of the 2016 Michael Hartnett Award. He is Professor of Modern Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester where, with Ian McGuire, he founded the Centre for New Writing and The Manchester Review. He also runs the online poetry digest, The Page, is Deputy Chair of the Irish Arts Council, and writes a monthly poetry review column for The Irish Times.
Paul Knowles
Co-editor Paul Knowles comes from an educational background, having over ten years of experience as an English teacher and Head of English in schools and colleges in Manchester and Marbella. He completed his MA in Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester in 2019, before starting his PhD in environmental British and Irish short fiction. His thesis is on Haunted Pasts and Possible Futures in Ecogeographical Short Fiction: Crisis and Chronotope — under the supervision of Anke Bernau and Robert Spencer. His research focuses on contemporary British and Irish ecogeographical short story collections and Ecocriticism. His writing critically reflects upon Williams, Olgwig, Fisher, Ingold and Rebanks’ formulations on the pastoral-mode, diabolism, environmental disorientation and the weird and eerie. In addition, his research critically explores and develops upon Bakhtin’s theories on the chronotope — his thesis asks: ‘How does short fiction conceptualize different understandings of time from different species and the more-than-human-world?’ He’s a member of ASLE-UKI and he is the Communications Officer for the European Network of Short Fiction Research.
Joseph Hunter
Co-editor Joseph Hunter is a fiction writer and poet whose poetry and fiction have been published in various literary journals and anthologies. He studied English at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, before spending a decade away from education. He completed his MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in 2020, and went on to study for a PhD in English and Creative Writing. He teaches at the University of Manchester, and his critical research is concerned with narrative theory. He is writing a novel about the (self) destructive facets of masculinity.
Ana García-Soriano
Social Media Editor Dr Ana García-Soriano holds a PhD from the University of Leeds where she is also a Writing Mentor. Entitled ‘Reading Intimacy in Contemporary Short Stories by black British Women’, her ‘la Caixa’ foundation funded thesis examines three ‘minor’ articulations of intimacy in the short stories of Zadie Smith, Jackie Kay and Bernardine Evaristo. Her work is published, or forthcoming, in The Journal of the Short Story in English, Short Fiction in Theory & Practice and Jackie Kay: Critical Essays (2024). She is co-editor of the Special Issues ‘Landscape and Temporality’ in Short Fiction in Theory & Practice.
Previous Editors:
Stuti Dhar Chowdhury
2024-25 Assistant Editor Stuti Dhar Chowdhury is a postgraduate student of English Literature and American Studies at the University of Manchester. She completed her undergraduate degree from The University of Delhi, India, with a First class Honours’ degree in English literature. Her research during the same was ‘German Romanticism and the Fragment of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan’ focusing on Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments (1798) and Immanuel Kant’s idea of imagination and its role in aesthetic judgements. She has previously worked as an editor on her collegiate magazine, and as a social media coordinator for the same. Her current areas of interest majorly encompass literary theory and criticism, specifically Psychoanalysis and Feminist theories. Additionally, she has an experience as a copywriter at Leo Burnett, which equipped her with quick wit for the written form. She is currently on the content creation team for the University of Manchester, writing blogs and making video-form content for the current and prospective students.
Chad Campbell
Chad Campbell has published two collections of poetry with Signal Editions, Laws & Locks (2015), and Nectarine (2021). He is the co-lead of creative writing at the University of Leed’s Lifelong Learning Centre and teaches on the MA program at Teesside University. Chad is currently at work on his third collection of poetry.
Lucy Burns
Lucy Burns edited the Review between 2015 and 2018, helping to redesign the site in 2016. She received her PhD student from the University of Manchester in 2019. She is currently an editorial assistant at Manchester University Press.
Geoff Ryman
Geoff Ryman is a Canadian living in the UK. He received a Leverhulme International Academic Fellowship for 2016 that paid for him to interview 100 African writers of speculative fiction. He is writing up the 100 interviews step by step and publishing them on the Strange Horizons website. His own fiction has won many awards from the Arthur C Clarke Award (twice) to the British Science Fiction Award (three times, including his non fictions series 100 African Writers of SFF), the Canadian Sunburst Award (twice) and many others including the Philip K Dick Award, the James Tiptree Award and the Nebula Award for best novelet. Until September 2017 he remains a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, teaching creative writing. He does administrative work for the African Speculative Fiction Society and the Nommo Awards for Speculative Fiction by Africans, which he helped develop. Geoff guest edited issue 18, ’21 Today: The Rise of African Speculative Fiction.’
Ian McGuire
Ian McGuire has been at The University of Manchester since 1996, initially as a lecturer in American Literature and more recently as a lecturer in Creative Writing. He now co-directs the Centre for New Writing.
His first novel – the contemporary campus novel Incredible Bodies – was published by Bloomsbury in March 2006, and was described as “hugely entertaining” and “a 21st century Lucky Jim” by The Times. The Sunday Times found it “very funny and disconcertingly sad”, while John Mullan in The New Statesman noted that Incredible Bodies – a “refreshingly low-minded campus novel” – was evidence that the genre had plenty of misanthropic life in it. His second novel The North Water was published in 2016.
He has written and published on Whitman, Melville and Howells, and is particularly interested in the American realist tradition from the 1880s to the present day. He has also published short stories in The Paris Review, The Chicago Review and elsewhere. Ian edited the Review until January 2016.
Valerie O’Riordan
Valerie O’Riordan was born in Ireland in 1980. She received her BA in English Literature and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, in 2002, and, after several years employment in television and film post-production, her MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from the University of Manchester, in 2010.
She is currently completing her Creative Writing PhD, researching short story cycles in the context of time, identity and narrativity, supervised by Dr Ian McGuire and Dr Kaye Mitchell. She was the 2010 recipient of the Bristol Short Story Prize and has three times been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for flash fiction. Her chapbook, Enough, was published in 2012 by Gumbo Press. Her fiction has appeared in Fugue and Sou’wester. She co-edits the book review website, Bookmunch. She edited the Review between 2012 and 2015.
Jodie Kim
Jodie Kim was born in Seoul, Korea and moved to America when she was seven years old. She received her BA in English and Studio Art from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010 and her MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from the University of Manchester in 2011.
Her PhD was on minority voices in contemporary literature of the American South. She was supervised by Dr. Geoff Ryman and Dr. Ian McGuire from the Centre for New Writing, and Dr. Michael P. Bibler from Northumbria University. She was the recipient of the Centre for New Writing Fellowship as well as the Widening Participation Fellowship. Jodie led the redesign of this site in 2012 and provided the photos for MR9.
Nathaniel Ogle
Nathaniel Ogle was born in the 90’s and raised in Darlington, County Durham. He studies on the PhD programme at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing under the supervision of M.J. Hyland. You can find his fiction in The Stockholm Review of Literature, his poetry in Black&BLUE. He lives precariously in London. Nathaniel was a contributing editor for issue 16.