Abstract

This book focuses on creative writing both as a subject in universities and beyond academia, with chapters arranged around three organising sub-themes of practice, research and pedagogy. It explores the ‘creative’ component of creative writing in the globalised marketplace, making the point that creative writing occurs in and around universities throughout the world. It examines the convergence of education, globalisation and economic discourses at the intersection of the university sector and creative industries, and foregrounds the competing interests at the core of creativity as it appears in the neo-liberal global discourse in which writers are enmeshed. The book offers case studies from the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and Singapore that are indicative of the challenges faced by academics, postgraduate students and creative industry professionals around the world.

This book is an excellent addition to studies in Creative Writing. Its contributors are each, in their own way, outward looking towards the positioning of contemporary creative arts and writing. Their scholarship and creativity engages in-depth with institutional, economic and cultural influences, and constraints, upon contemporary production of creative writing in the 21st century.

After the 'long work' of alienating creativity from commercial-political worlds, this book is evidence of a new consciousness of the ways these realms overlap, seed, deform and enliven each other. This exchange between writers from UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and Singapore debates and ponders whether creative writing might be a brilliant career move, a player in resurgent global education, a search for community, therapy, magic, an un-saleable invention, or our last real craft.

Dominique Hecq is Associate Professor in Writing at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. Dominique is also Editor of Bukker Tillibul: The Online Journal of Practice-Led Research.

This timely and comprehensive study brings prominent Australian and international scholars together to consider the interplay of global capital, the marketplace and creative writing in the 21st century. This landmark volume also examines creative writing's important but often unacknowledged contribution to global innovation and the knowledge economy. A must read text for teachers, students, writers and anyone interested in creative writing, creativity and the global marketplace in the new millennium.