Ian McGuire has been at The University of Manchester since 1996, and now co-directs the Centre for New Writing. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia where he specialised in nineteenth century American Literature, and has written and published on Whitman, Melville, Howells and the American realist tradition.

His contemporary campus novel Incredible Bodies (2006) was described as "hugely entertaining" and "a 21st century Lucky Jim" by The Times, while The New Statesman saw it as evidence that the genre had “plenty of misanthropic life in it”.

McGuire has also published short stories in The Paris Review, The Chicago Review and elsewhere, and is currently working on a new novel which is "definitely not set in a university."

Website : http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/newwriting/about/ianmcguire/