Professor Graham Mort

National Teaching Fellow 2015 Professor Graham Mort founded Lancaster University's Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research. A prizewinning poet and short story writer, his academic career was preceded by training as a teacher and work as a freelance writer in education specialising in multilingual and multi-arts projects. He has worked extensively in sub-Saharan Africa for the British Council, designing and directing mentoring projects in creative writing for print-media and radio broadcast.  His approach to teaching is student-centred rather than following the orthodoxy of a prescribed curriculum. His MA student Janet Lees commented: "I count Graham as one of the most inspirational teachers I've come across. As a postgraduate tutor he very quickly establishes trust, and then strikes the right balance between being challenging and being supportive. His incredibly wide-ranging knowledge and experience are complemented by his zeal, both for creative writing and for teaching it.  It was in Graham's workshops that I had more 'lightbulb' moments than in any others. I think this is partly because of his appetite for and engagement with new ideas, techniques and initiatives in creative writing, as well as his skill and eloquence in expressing how these relate back to traditional approaches." Graham is an eLearning expert and has pioneered postgraduate programmes taught by this method at MA and PhD level. This has led to the development of an international community of students at Lancaster: "Professor Graham Mort is far-sighted and a particular example is the initiation of the Crossing Borders Writing scheme in Uganda which opened up-coming writers to new creative experiences. As a distance-learning mentor, his ability to comprehend and interpret poems on the spot, translating them aptly to an international class, was remarkable and inspiring." (Beverley Nambozo, Crossing Borders Participant, MA Student) Graham has written extensively about eLearning pedagogy. He is currently helping to develop a research project with the University of Soran, recording the narratives of older women who survived Saddam Hussein's Al Anfal campaign against the Kurdish people. His new book of short stories, Terroir, was published by Seren in May 2015.