Michael Langan • Arts Editor
Michael Langan has been contributing to Polari Magazine since March, 2012. As a teenager, he started out writing poetry and, at the age of 14, had his first poem published in the school magazine. It was about a man having a heart attack. In his twenties he delighted audiences in the northwest of England as a member of the performance-writing group, Queerscribes, before turning to prose as his primary means of expression. He still loves poetry but just doesn’t write it any more.
He has an MA in Literature & Cultural History and a PhD in Creative Writing, both from Liverpool John Moores University. During his studies and practice he learned the importance of craft in writing and developed an appreciation for editing and being edited, in a way that hones the eye and toughens the skin, but he also feels like he’s still learning what it means to write well.
Having devised, developed and led the creative writing degree programme at the University of Greenwich for 10 years he decided, in the middle of the worst economic crisis in living memory, to give up his well-established academic career to work as a freelance writer and editor and, as a result, is a lot poorer but much happier.
His favourite fiction writers are Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, David Mitchell, Milan Kundera, W.G. Sebald, Jennifer Egan, John Cheever, Raymond Carver and Virginia Woolf. He also loves the work of the art historian T.J.Clark, the music critic Alex Ross, the polymath Geoff Dyer, and the later writings of Roland Barthes. He’s got a couple of novels of his own on the go and aslo writes short stories. He’s currently seeking an agent and a lucrative publishing deal.
