Award-winning author joins University

Award-winning novelist and short story writer, Jon McGregor, has been appointed as Professor of Creative Writing (Writer in Residence) in the School of English.

Honorary graduate Jon has been a guest lecturer but has now taken up a permanent Professorship one day a week. Jon said: “Being able to talk to students about what make a good piece of writing, why this is working, what the writer has done to get at this point and how they can apply that to their own writing, that’s really exciting. Universities are a fruitful and energetic environment in which to develop your own creative writing and to be exposed to different ideas of what writing is doing and what writing can be. They have the potential to be very generative for students and young writers.”

Pro-Vice-Chancellor with responsibility for the Faculty of Arts Professor Sarah O’Hara said: “Jon is one of the UK’s brightest literary talents. His creativity and experience will have a hugely positive impact on students and enhance the University’s reputation as a leader in Arts and Humanities.”

The development of a new literary journal for creative writing will be one of Jon’s key missions. The journal will allow students to get hands-on editing and collating experience and how to make a number of pieces of work function as a cohesive whole. Jon said: “It will feature the best of contemporary writers internationally and I will be drawing on my own contacts and the University’s global connections. If a student writes something which is good enough then that would be really exciting for them and a stepping stone in their career but mainly their role would be on the production side. If you can read a piece of work and understand the mechanics and what the writer has done to get to that point then you can bring that to bear on your own writing.”

Watch an interview with Jon at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO1HPIZDG7E

Diet could combat adverse side effects

Scientists at the University’s campuses in the UK and Malaysia say adverse side-effects caused by the anti-parasitic drug quinine in the treatment of malaria could be controlled by what we eat.

Research indicates that natural variation in our levels of the amino acid, tryptophan, has a marked bearing on how we respond to quinine treatment. It appears that the lower our levels of tryptophan the more likely it is that we would suffer side-effects. And because tryptophan is an essential amino acid the body cannot produce it — we get it from the food we eat.

Quinine is associated with a long list of side effects ranging from sickness and headaches to blindness, deafness and in rare cases death. This latest study, published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, could offer a cheap and simple way of combating our adverse reaction to quinine treatment and improving the performance of this important drug.

New hope in fight against breast cancer

Scientists have identified a protein which could help predict survival outcomes for women with the most aggressive forms of breast cancer.

Research funded by Breast Cancer Campaign could help predict survival outcomes for triple negative breast cancer and basal-like breast cancer — which affect up to 8,000 women each year in the UK. Triple-negative and basal-like subgroups, almost twice as likely to be diagnosed in black women than Caucasian women, exhibit aggressive behaviour and are more likely to spread.

New research led by Dr Stewart Martin investigated levels of proteins known as calpains in tumours from 1,371 patients. Results, published in Annals of Oncology, suggest that the amount of calpain-2 can identify patients with basal-like or triple-negative breast cancer that have a better or worse prognosis and can therefore be used to ‘stratify’ patients into different prognostic groups which indicate their predicted survival.