This landmark biography explodes entrenched conceptions of Keats as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure, and instead reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium. Focusing on crucial turning points, John Keats: A New Life finds in the locations of Keats’ poems new keys to the nature of his imaginative quest, and it is the first biography to provide a full and fresh account of Keats’ childhood in the City of London and how it shaped the would-be poet. It also sheds light on Keats’ doomed passion for Fanny Brawne, his circle of brilliant friends, hitherto unknown City relatives, and much more.

South African novelist, Damon Galgut, twice short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, is taking up the International Writer's Residency this year. This is the second year of the venture, run in partnership with the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust. The partnership brings a poet or novelist of international distinction to St Andrews where they take up the residency at Barns-Graham's house at Balmungo in the autumn of each year. They receive a stipend from the School of English, allowing them to engage in uninterrupted creative work for that period. The Resident Writer will give a public reading at the University, and will meet with postgraduate students.

Damon is widely regarded as one of the foremost South African writers of his generation. He was born in Pretoria and currently lives in Cape Town. Both The Good Doctor (2003) and his most recent novel, In a Strange Room (2010), were short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Professor Lorna Hutson will be giving the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures at the University of Oxford from 16-25 October 2012. The general title is ‘Circumstantial Shakespeare’ and the individual titles are:

• 16 October, 5.15 Are those circumstances really necessary? Romeo and Juliet
• 18 October, 5.15 “Imaginary work”: Lucrece’s circumstances
• 23 October, 5.15 Motivated uncertainty: Shakespeare’s circumstantial dramaturgy
• 25 October, 5.15 “The innocent Sleepe”: tragic emotion and politics in Macbeth

Professor Susan Sellers is chairing ‘The Legacy of Katherine Mansfield’, the 2012 Katherine Mansfield Birthday Lecture, with Salley Vickers and Ali Smith, which will take place on Sunday 14 October, at 2pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD. Susan has also written an introduction to the specially produced birthday booklet.

Phillip Mallett convened two sessions at the ESSE (European Society for Studies in English) conference at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul on ‘Hardy and Liminality’.

On Saturday, 20 October, Professor Don Paterson will be taking part in Shakespeare and the contemporary sonnet, a one day symposium at Roehampton University. Further details can be found here.

Lesley Glaister has published short stories in both New Writing Scotland 2012 and in the Edinburgh Review. She has also conducted a series of Masterclasses in Writing in Mslexia magazine

Paul Johnston’s fourteenth novel, The Green Lady, will be published by Crème de la Crime in October.

Marina Cano was speaking at the Conference Feminism in Academia: An Age of Austerity? at the University of Nottingham on 28 September. Her paper, ‘Looking back in anger? Jane Austen's early female scholars’, re-examined the contributions of Austen's first female critics.

John Patrick Pazdziora was interviewed on STV’s Scotland Tonight about J. K. Rowling’s new novel The Casual Vacancy.

Tsung-Han Tsai, assisted by fellow postgraduates Lisa Griffin and Anna Watson, has been awarded a GRADskills Innovation Grant from CAPOD, the University’s Centre for Academic, Professional and Organisational Development. The grant will be put towards the costs of the centenary conference on E. M. Forster’s Maurice at St Andrews in November. For more information about the conference, see http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~maurice/.