Elizabeth Speller has a Cambridge MA and MPhil. and was a visiting scholar at Lucy Cavendish College.
Her three novels include The Return of Captain John Emmett (Orange Book of the Month, Richard & Judy pick) and At Break of Day (CNY State One Read 2015 in the US). They are published in eight countries. Her non-fiction includes Following Hadrian (Hodder/OUP US) and a memoir, The Sunlight on the Garden (Granta). She was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Poetry and provided the libretto for Michael Berkeley's work Farewell, written in memory of Sir Paul McCartney 's wife Linda.
Her journalism includes The Independent, the Financial Times, the TLS, and Vogue. She has taught at Cambridge, Bristol and Birmingham Universities. She was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Warwick and is currently completing a further novel for Virago.
She teaches on two diploma courses at the ICE, Madingley Hall: Advanced Fiction and Historical Fiction and on the certificate course she teaches Life Writing. In 2017 she will start teaching on the MSt course too.
Elizabeth is very experienced in teaching mature students and her classes tend to be thematic and discursive as well as informative; she hopes by the end of her course students feel they have learned rather than simply been taught. Her courses often include visual material and music. In 2016 a trip to the Fitzwilliam Museum for the Historical Fiction diploma students was popular and creatively inspiring.
