Kim Sherwood (BA (Hons), MA)
Lecturer in Creative Writing
Contact details
- Email: Kim.Sherwood@ed.ac.uk
Availability
I am a part-time member of staff. My working days are Tuesdays, Wednesday afternoons and Thursdays. Please contact me by email about my office hours. My office is room 2.47 in 50 George Square.
For publicity enquiries relating to James Bond and the Double O series please contact my publicist Maud.Davies@harpercollins.co.uk. For publicity enquiries relating to A Wild & True Relation please contact my publicist Niamh.Anderson@littlebrown.co.uk.
Background
I am a Lecturer in Creative Writing. As a novelist, I contribute towards teaching creative writing and literature at postgraduate and undergraduate levels. I also supervise postgraduate dissertations, and am available as a PhD supervisor. I currently teach on the Creative Writing MSc and the English and Scottish Literature MA. Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, I taught literature and creative writing at undergraduate level at the University of East Anglia (2014-2015); on the Critical and Creative Writing MA at the University of Sussex (2016); and co-developed a Creative Writing BA as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of the West of England (2016-2021). My debut novel, Testament (riverrun, 2018), was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award, shortlisted for the Best First Novel Award, and won the Bath Novel Award and the Harper's Bazaar Big Book of the Year. In 2019, I was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. I am now writing a trilogy of Double O novels expanding the James Bond universe for the Ian Fleming Estate and HarperCollins. The first in the trilogy, Double or Nothing, was published September 1st 2022. My next literary novel is A Wild & True Relation, out with Virago in February 2023. The novel follows a girl who joins a smuggler's screw in eighteenth-century Devon, and explores women's writing and history in a subversive adventure story.
Postgraduate teaching
Creative Writing MSc, Fiction seminars and workshops.
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
No
Research summary
My debut novel, Testament (riverrun, 2018), explored the impact of the Holocaust across three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, from 1944 to the present day. Testament was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award, shortlisted for the Best First Novel Award, and won the Bath Novel Award and the Harper's Bazaar Big Book of the Year. In 2019, I was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. While writing Testament, I was working through questions of intergenerational trauma and grief – which manifest in my own family history – as well as interest in the archive, memory and identity, art, memorial and the city, and the ways in which we feel history in the present. The novel contributed original research to my field in its treatment of the forced labour service in Hungary. Formally, I was engaged with structure as architectural, mapping the novel on to the voids of the Jewish Museum Berlin as well as the scaffold of memory provided by questions posed to Survivors by the Hungarian Committee for Attending Deportees. I was further concerned with language and violence, point of view and tense, place, and character dynamics within families. Much of Testament was born from archival and site-based research, and you can read about this creative process in a journal article I wrote for 'Writing in Practice' Vol.5, titled 'The Facts that Engender'.
Current research interests
I am currently writing a trilogy of Double O novels expanding the James Bond universe for the Ian Fleming Estate and HarperCollins. A Wild & True Relation, my next literary novel will be the lead title for Virago in 2023.Past research interests
I also write academic articles and book chapters. You can read about the archive and site-based research behind Testament in a journal article I wrote for 'Writing in Practice' Vol.5, titled 'The Facts that Engender', in which I also explore the impact of Virginia Woolf's treatment of history on my own historical fiction. I also had the chance to write about my interest in historical fiction for a landmark book, titled Georgette Heyer, History and Historical Fiction (UCL Press, 2021), the first of its kind on Heyer. I contributed a chapter titled 'Pride and Prejudice: Metafiction and the Value of Historical Romance in Georgette Heyer’. My research interests also include the literary novel, crime fiction and spy thrillers, genre, and writing by women.Knowledge exchange
Special Collections Commission, Libraries Unlimited and Arts Council England, January 2019-December 2020
I successfully secured £20,000 funding from Libraries Unlimited and Arts Council England for this practice-led research project with high cultural impact, spearheading a creative writing and augmented reality project highlighting women writers in their Rare and Early Books Special Collection. The project, titled ‘Unlocking the Cage: Women in the Rare and Early Printed Books Collection at Exeter Library’, contributes to knowledge in my field through a refined and culturally new approach to public engagement in the work of eighteenth and nineteenth--century women writers; and an examination of the history of women writers that integrates literary criticism, creative writing, the history of book collecting, and local archives and libraries. As we approach installation, I hope the defining impact will be that the project enables participants to see past the erasure of women writers in our male-dominated canon, broadening understanding of their significant contribution to our culture.
I have appeared at numerous festivals, including Edinburgh International Book Festival, Bath Literature Festival, WOMAD, Budleigh Salterton Festival, Hampstead & Highgate Literary Festival, Off the Shelf, and elsewhere. I have been invited to speak at Waterstone Book Clubs and independent bookshops nationwide. I make frequent media appearances, including BBC Radio 4 Front Row, BBC Radio Bristol, the podcast Griefcast, and elsewhere. My articles have appeared in The Telegraph, Book Ends, Bookanista, Best Book Forward, H is for History, Bookphace, Writers Online, Interesting Literature, and elsewhere. I have appeared as a guest writer on panels and contributed to conferences internationally, most recently at Moniack Mhor in Scotland and the Literature Colloquium in Berlin.
Conference details
- ‘Raffles and Mr. Leonard: Metafiction and the Genre Debate in E.W. Hornung and Elmore Leonard’, paper delivered at the Mystery and Detective Fiction Conference, Washington D.C., April 2019
- ‘Pride and Prejudice: Metafiction and the Value of Historical Romance in Georgette Heyer’, paper delivered at conference ‘The Nonesuch? Georgette Heyer and Her Historical Fiction Contemporaries’, UCL, 19th June 2018. This paper was the basis for my book chapter in Georgette Heyer, History and Historical Fiction (UCL Press, 2021).
- Creative Histories, roundtable discussion on the interdisciplinary relationship between creative writing and history, University of Bristol, 26th January 2018.
- ‘He’s Not Dead Yet, Keep Scrolling’, paper on digital and material research, online symposium ‘Digital Selves in Research’, The Still Point Journal, July 2016.