Jenn Ashworth

BA (Cantab), MA (Manchester), PhD (Lancaster), PGCert (Lancaster), FRSL

College roles

Honorary Fellow (2022)

Biography

Professor Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982 in Preston. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge and the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. After starting a career as a librarian – including in prison libraries – she published her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, in 2009. It was awarded a Betty Trask Award by the Society of Authors. On the publication of her second, Cold Light (Sceptre, 2011) she was featured on the BBC’s The Culture Show as one of the UK’s twelve best new writers. Her third novel The Friday Gospels (2013) and her fourth Fell (2016) are also published by Sceptre. In 2019 she published a memoir-in-essays called Notes Made While Falling which was a New Statesman Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Her latest novel is Ghosted: A Love Story (Sceptre, 2021) which was shortlisted for the Portico Prize.

She lives in Lancashire, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and is a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University. Her teaching specialisms, developed during innovative workshop practice with memoirists and personal essayists, seek to decolonialise the creative writing classroom and include collaborative, practice-based research into communities of practice, creative approaches to space and place in fiction and creative nonfiction, and explorations of trauma, the body and religious experience.