Rob Francis

Year of Graduation: 2019

  • Course PhD in Creative Writing
  • School School of Humanities
  • Nationality British
  • Career industry Education/creative
  • Current job title Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing Poet and writer
  • Current Company University of Wolverhampton

Like the she-wolf of the pack, the teams in the Department of English always had my back

My supervisor, Paul McDonald, and the wider team of teachers and researchers in the Department of English were the best thing about studying here. Everyone, right from the word go, welcomed me in to the pack with warmth and with enquiring minds. McDonald's expertise as a novelist and critical thinker, his sense of humour, and his down-to-earth character were all instrumental to my success and my desire to keep pushing forward with complicated and difficult research tasks. This is typical of the School of Humanities and Wolves as a University; intelligent, rigorous, witty, and always rooted in the community they're part of. Without this sense of being in good hands, academically, as well being part of a gang, I'm certain my recent success as a writer wouldn't have paid off.
Studying and researching here at Wolves has been fundamental preparation for my career. It's taught me discipline, organisation and craft that are instrumental to any creative thinker. Furthermore, as my research and creative interests are so connected to the Black Country, having an institute so rooted and passionate about local culture, history, and community has been instrumental.
I am now one of the lecturers in Creative and Professional Writing here at the University of Wolverhampton. I'm responsible for running several undergraduate modules, teaching regional writing, genre writing, poetry, and humour. I also look after several final year dissertation students, guiding them through their final year projects. I'm also a poet and writer, so I guess I am responsible for producing new and interesting ideas and creating novel approaches to form those ideas.
In 2019 I was the David Bradshaw writer in residence at Oxford University.
We've got an amazing library, so read as much and as widely as you can. Reading makes you a better communicator, better writer, and better at making critical and complicated judgements. Talk to everyone. Wolves is a pack, yes, but its a pack with a rich mix of great minds, funny minds, friendly minds - again, conversing makes you better at really important and difficult-to-master things. This is all fun; fun and enthralling and useful work - and like Andy Warhol said, the most important thing is work.