Dr Valerie O'Riordan

Dr Valerie O'Riordan is a writer, critic and academic. She lectures in Creative Writing and English at the University of Bolton, focussing on fiction-writing, critical, cultural and literary theory, and student employability. Her fiction has appeared in numerous national and international publications, including Tin House, LitMag, The Lonely Crowd, and The Manchester Review, and she is currently working on a novel, thanks to the generous support of Arts Council England. In 2019 she was awarded an O.Henry prize for her short story, 'Bad Girl'.

Valerie's areas of research include contemporary Anglophone literature, critical posthumanism, trauma studies, and intersectional feminism, and she has written on Jennifer Egan, AL Kennedy, Ali Smith, and Chris Adrian. She welcomes research proposals from prospective PhD students on any/all of the above topics.