Ian McGuire

The North Water Royal Society of Literature Encore Award for best second novel of the year 2017

The North Water was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016

The North Water New York Times 10 Best Books of 2016

Dr Ian McGuire (born 1964) is an English author and academic. In 1996 he joined the University of Manchester as a lecturer in American Literature and later lectured in Creative Writing. He was Co-Director of the Centre for New Writing and is currently an Honorary Senior Lecturer.

McGuire is from Hull, East Yorkshire and studied at the University of Manchester, later he received a MA from the University of Sussex then a Ph.D in 19th Century American Literature from the University of Virginia. He has published stories in the Paris Review and Chicago Review among others. He has published articles on Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and William Dean Howells and his sphere of interest is the American realist tradition from 1880s onwards. This tradition is defined as the "faithful representation of reality" and his published works reflect this interest. His biography of Richard Ford an American short story writer "... argues that Ford’s work is best understood as a form of pragmatic realism and thus positions him as part of a deeply rooted and ongoing American debate about the nature of realism and pragmatism." The novel The North Water ",,, strength ... lies in its well-researched detail and persuasive descriptions of the cold, violence, cruelty and the raw, bloody business of whale-killing."