EMMA CLAIRE SWEENEY is the Co-Director of the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio.
During her 15 years of teaching creative writing, Emma has mentored many fiction and non-fiction writers. She is a central academic at the Open University, where she chairs and designs undergraduate and post-graduate creative writing courses. She was formerly Director of Professional Tutoring at New York University – London, and she co-founded City University of London’s year-long novel writing course.
Emma has an MA in English from the University of Cambridge and another in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and a PhD from the Open University. She has won Society of Authors, Arts Council and Royal Literary Fund awards, and has written for publications such as the Paris Review, TIME and the Washington Post.
She was named as both an Amazon Rising Star and a Hive Rising Writer for her debut novel, Owl Song at Dawn (Legend Press 2016), which went on to win Nudge Literary Book of the Year. The novel was inspired by Emma’s sister who has cerebral palsy and autism and was informed by her PhD research into literary representations of learning disability.
Stemming from Something Rhymed, the website on female literary friendship that Emma runs with her own friend Emily Midorikawa, she co-wrote their debut non-fiction book, A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf (Aurum/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2017). In her foreword, Margaret Atwood described the work as a “great service to literary history”. She is currently working on a new novel.
- Areas of expertise: literary fiction & literary/commercial crossover, short stories, narrative non-fiction, memoir
- Locations: London & Hertfordshire
- Possible meeting places: Gladstone’s Library (Hawarden), Lllangollen
Emma’s website; Emma is also on Twitter and Facebook
