Dr Lynda Clark

Lecturer in Creative Writing (Interdisciplinary Futures)

Biography

Background

Lynda Clark's first novel Beyond Kidding (2019, Fairlight Books) was optioned by Film4 and is in development. Her short story collection Dreaming in Quantum was published by Fairlight Books in 2021 and includes the highly acclaimed 'Ghillie's Mum' which won the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Europe and Canada and was shortlisted in the 2019 BBC Short Story Award. 

Prior to joining academia, Lynda worked as a bookseller and in the video game industry as a writer and producer. She grew up on a council estate and is the first (and currently remains the only) member of her extended family to attend university. 

She has a PhD in interactive narrative from Nottingham Trent University and is interested in writing with and for new technologies.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Programme Director Narrative Futures MSc 23/24

IASH Affiliate 23-24

Undergraduate teaching

Year 3 Creative Writing: Prose

Postgraduate teaching

MSc Narrative Futures: Interdisciplinary Futures; World of Story

MSc Creative Writing: Prose

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Dr Clark welcomes proposals which cross disciplinary boundaries e.g. interactive digital fiction, visual novels, narratives which employ text generation, AI or other technologies, plus any which engage with game studies, narratology, serialization or speculative fiction in their creative and/or critical component.

Research summary

Lynda is primarily interested in how new technologies shape us and the world around us. This manifests in her prose, interactive narratives and video game work. She also has a keen interest in depicting unusual and disordered voices in creative writing. 

Current research interests

Writing for and with AI, text generation and generative stories, speaking machines and other non-human voices.

Past research interests

The effect of serialization on narrative in Victorian fiction and episodic video games, interactive narratives for reflective purposes, digital preservation of interactive works.

Project activity

in 2019, Lynda was Innovation Fellow at the British Library, working on their Emerging Formats project. Lynda's particular research strand was Interactive Narratives. She explored the effectiveness of existing archiving tools for collecting born-digital web-based works, curated a Special Collection for the UK Web Archive and produced formal reports and a creative work reflecting on the process. The creative piece, The Memory Archivist, won the 2019 British Library Labs award for Best Creative Work Using Library Collections.

On completion of the fellowship, Lynda joined the University of Dundee's InGAME research center as Research and Development Fellow in Narrative and Play where she worked with a variety of industry and academic partners on applications of creative writing for new technologies and vice versa. 

View all 21 publications on Research Explorer

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