Dr Dan Vyleta

• PhD (University of Cambridge)
• MA
• BA (Hons)

Dan Vyleta is a novelist and cultural historian. His first novel, Pavel & I, gathered immediate international acclaim and was translated into eight languages. His second novel, The Quiet Twin, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Crooked Maid was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the 2014 J.I. Segal Award. Dan self-describes as a Czech-German-Canadian which indicates that a) life is complicated, b) the nation state is not what it used to be and c) he is rather confused about these matters. He loves Jazz, (ice) hockey and Sveijkian strategies of resistance to power.

I teach all aspects of creative writing at undergraduate and graduate levels, focussing on prose fiction and narrative theory. Recent and current modules include:

• Creative Writing Foundation (BA)
• Poetry and Prose (BA)
• Storytelling for Page and Screen (BA)
• Create Writing Project (BA)
• Editing (BA)
• Intertextuality (MA)
• Creative Writing Research Skills (MA)

I am part of the supervision team supporting the sizeable community of PhD students in creative writing at Birmingham University and directly supervise several PhD projects (novel + short stories). Amongst other interests (see Research), I am interested in working with writers who work in a language other than their mother tongue (i.e. exophone writers).

Find out more - our PhD Creative Writing  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research and writing focus on the ethics and aesthetics of the literature of perpetration (i.e. literature that represents complicity in violence, especially systemic violence). I am also interested in the ethical and epistemological implications of aesthetic choices made in fiction more generally, and in theories outlining the role of narrative for our lives in a wide variety of contexts. Additionally, I am interested in the boundaries between so-called genre fiction and literary fiction, with a particular interest in crime fiction, speculative/science fiction and YA fiction. My historical work focusses on antisemitism, narratives of criminality and on discursive description as a mode of knowledge.

• Please find me at www.danvyleta.com