University Visiting Professor and Award-Winning Novelist releases next Greatest Hit
Alison MacLeod’s acclaimed new novel, Tenderness, is her “21st Century hymn to the human imagination”.
Alison has enjoyed many successes in the literary world, including a shortlisting for the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize, another for Canada’s prestigious 2017 Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the honour of the British Library’s Writer’s Award in 2016. Her last novel, Unexploded, was long-listed for the 2013 Booker Prize for Fiction.
Alison’s new novel, released this month, has already made waves in the literary world. The Observer calls it, “Glorious and arresting… A widescreen novel”. The Guardian hails it as “a propulsive, addictive, joyous read…There is also a sustained love song to Sussex, where MacLeod lives… Victories for freedom should be sung from the rooftops. That is what MacLeod has done”.
Farther afield, Publisher’s Weekly USA finds it ‘triumphant’: ‘this places MacLeod among the best of contemporary novelists.’ The national Australian broadcaster ABC Radio says: ‘Tenderness is daring and innovative… The structure is unexpected and the story is epic and bold,… it is also big-spirited and alive.’
Vicki Feaver, Chichester Emerita Professor and author of I want! I Want!, said “‘TENDERNESS is amazing. It is a book about love and struggle – the subjects of all the greatest novels… Genius’.
In an interview with the Independent.ie, Alison recalled Angela Carter as a writer who shaped her early 20s. “She was fearless on the page: hilarious, dark, genre-defying, magical and erudite. What a force. My first novel, The Changeling (1996), a picaresque story of self-invention, is certainly indebted to her.”
Alison Macleod is Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester where she presents masterclasses to students on BA (Hons) Creative Writing and the MA in Creative Writing. Her successes continue to inspire students and guide them in their careers.
