Melissa Wan
- Email: enmsbr@leeds.ac.uk
- Thesis title: Making the absent present: Disability, textual erasure and (not) writing sex
- Supervisors: Professor Clare Barker, Dr Campbell Edinborough
Profile
I am a prose writer awarded the Crowdfunded Writers’ Scholarship to study Creative Writing at UEA and author of ‘This Must Be Earth’ (Nightjar Press, 2021). In 2019 I was an Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Writing Fellow and the Northern Word Factory Apprentice, mentored by Carys Davies and supported by New Writing North.
My short fiction has been published by independent presses, including Bluemoose Books, Dead Ink Books and Cōnfingō Publishing and my most recently published story ‘Ghost Story’ was commissioned by Levenshulme Old Library and recorded for ALL FM.
Research interests
My practice researchPhD explores textual erasure in relation to the writing of sex and to the absence of disabled bodies within fiction, building on a one-day literary conference I conceived and co-organised at UEA in 2019, I’ll Show You Mine: A Sex-Writing Symposium. Using these gaps as ludic provocations and writing from my embodiment as someone who lives with multiple sclerosis, I will employ creative-critical practices to write sex back in and make present what was formerly absent. The resulting thesis will disrupt normative conventions for writing sex, develop a new disability aesthetics for prose fiction, and produce original creative works which contribute to the short story corpus.
My research is funded by the AHRC through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities.
Qualifications
- MA Creative Writing: Prose Fiction, University of East Anglia (2018 – 19), Distinction
- MA Paris Studies, University of London Institute in Paris (2012 – 13), Distinction
- BA (Hons) Social Sciences, University of Manchester (2009 – 12), First Class
Research groups and institutes
- Medical Humanities Research Group
- Centre for Practice Research in the Arts