Professor Richard Bradford, Professor of English at the Coleraine campus, today receives a Senior Distinguished Research Fellowship from the University.

The award recognises his scholarship in English literature. Since joining the university in 1987, he has written 15 books on a variety of aspects of literature and culture, from the Renaissance to his latest work, The Novel Now: Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, to be published by Blackwell next year. 

Born and brought up in South Derbyshire, Professor Bradford was educated at the Universities of Wales, graduating BA (English) and at Oxford where he obtained a D.Phil (English).

Before joining the University of Ulster as lecturer in English in 1987, he taught at the universities of Wales and Oxford and at Trinity College, Dublin. He was also a visiting lecturer at the universities of Warsaw and Budapest.

Professor Bradford, who is married, received a Personal Chair at the University of Ulster in 1996. He has received particular acclaim as a literary biographer. His book on Kingsley Amis (2001) was praised as “original and stimulating” by Amis’s novelist son, Martin. This year his study of poet Philip Larkin won praising reviews internationally. The Daily Express said it was “the best book on Larkin yet to appear…Utterly magnificent”.

Two new projects underpin his stature as a biographer. He is completing a biography of poet, playwright and novelist, John Wain, and has been appointed biographer of Alan Sillitoe, whose standing as an incisive observer of north of England working-class angst and values is enshrined in books such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

He said: “I feel honoured to have been awarded the Fellowship, and I would like to express my thanks to the University of Ulster for allowing me the time and opportunity to conduct my research and to publish.  The university is in my opinion an institution which values and encourages high-class research and I feel that I certainly have benefitted from this”.


Winter Graduation News 2005

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David Young
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