Roberta J Dewa: Writer and Tutor

I was a novelist before I was ever an academic, and I remain a writer by temperament and aspiration. In the 1980s, I published three historical novels with Robert Hale, but after my mother’s early death in 1983, I didn’t write for a long time, and when I began again my writing had become more serious and complex. In 1990 I returned to the formal education I had never completed and entered the University of Nottingham as a mature student, taking my BA, MA, and PhD in English Literature. I stayed on at university as a teacher, lecturing in language studies and running my own course in Creative Writing. While I was studying for my degrees, my own writing had to take second place, but it never went away. I continued to develop my understanding of the craft of writing, publishing poetry, reviews and short fiction in the small presses, both print and online; but I returned to the challenge of full-length works in 2005, when I embarked on the Creative Writing MA at Nottingham Trent University. My recently published novel The Esplanade (Weathervane Press, 2014) is about loss of voice and identity. And my memoir The Memory of Bridges, (Glass Tortoise, 2013) narrates the reclamation of a troubled past, and a return to the village of my childhood. Extracts from both works can be read on this website.