Come and hear three of our PhD Creative Writing students read from their fascinating prose works, and answer questions on the work and on the experience of researching and writing a practice-based Creative PhD.

Fangze Li’s autofiction project explores personal and political experiences of living between China and the UK during her studies at The University of Sheffield amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Her writing moves between China’s past and present, and between China and the UK today, shaped by both cross- cultural experience and family histories of state violence, including the Tiananmen Massacre. She previously worked in Shanghai as a creative writer for Siri and is the Chinese translator of Frederick the Great and Kaiser Joseph: An Episode of War and Diplomacy in the 18th Century by Harold Temperley.
Jane Ulph will be reading from her novel A Festival of Beautiful Mistakes. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing with Distinction and is researching how the embedded environmental narrative of the Botanical Mysteries of the Nineteenth century may be updated for a contemporary audience. In 2023 her writing was shortlisted for the Watson Little/Indie Novella writing competition. She has taught English to Secondary school students in different settings for twenty-five years and is also an ex-nurse.

Molly Aitken is the Irish bestseller of Bright I Burn and The Island Child. Her second novel was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. Her prize-winning short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Banshee and dramatised for BBC Radio 4. Molly is currently completing her PhD in Creative Writing and History at Hallam. Her work at Hallam is a novel, The Virgins, which is narrated by the mother of Romulus and Remus, Rhea Silvia, a river goddess haunting three women at three points in history. Molly’s research takes the form of a hybrid essay examining the overlaps and departures between creative history and creative writing.