PhDo or Die:

Next week – 1st October 2025 – I am starting a full-time PhD in Creative Writing, and I couldn’t be more excited!

But much like the proverbial road to Dublin, it’s been rocky to get here, to say the very least.

This will be my fourth (I know…) time at university. The first, I was the quintessential 18-year-old undergraduate fresh out of Sixth Form heading off to do a BA in English Literature at UEA, with three As at A-level to my name. I didn’t make the most of it, largely because of the financial need to work three jobs, but also because nothing about life or the world makes sense at age 18 and all you make are well-intentioned mistakes.

The second time, I was 22, having given up a place at Trinity College Dublin to do what I actually wanted to do (the MPhil in Irish Writing that – spoiler alert – I did eventually do) and then inexplicably been turned down for an MA in Biography at my very recent alma Mata, I enrolled on an MA in Sports Journalism at St Mary’s University in Twickenham.

I left early in May 2014 with an NCTJ diploma (that I had to resit because I got someone else’s result and failed for my ‘very poor, obviously non-native English’. That’s a great story), a PGDip in Sports Journalism, a freelance gig at Sky Sports and a driving licence.

The third time, life was in pieces. I sold my former marital home, started divorce proceedings, inexplicably lived off £18 a week of food shopping and got on a plane to Ireland in August 2018 to finally do the MPhil at Trinity College I had wanted to do years before. It was there that I finally came up with a – literal – novel idea and graduated with a First in my thesis and a notepad full of scribbles that would eventually become The Walk.

I initially started looking into the prospect of a PhD before I even left for Ireland, and it settled into our collective consciousness as something of an inevitability, when the universe decided it was the right time, and the right idea.

I wanted to come home and Queens University Belfast didn’t allow for distance learning, so that was that. I applied to Cambridge and was of course unsuccessful – an academic rite of passage, if ever there was one. I had heavy interest from Royal Holloway, but a suitable secondary supervisor couldn’t be found, as my research area at the time required two.

I delivered a research paper whilst six months’ pregnant back at TCD in May 2022, and publication in a journal was possible but never worked out, largely due to postnatal depression and having to return to my admin job full-time. I published other research in Modernist Studies Ireland, but ultimately my research career stagnated there.

I came up with a semblance of a novel idea surrounding a Queen-of-Hearts-related story, lots of Queen Victoria history, feminist ideology about traumatised little girls and powerful women, about two years later. I had a brief meeting with an academic about it who listened to me talk for approximately 85 seconds before saying, “No, no, I think you should write about your Dad.”

I cancelled my application and then my Dad died. I don’t know if that makes the joke on me, him or my dad to be honest.

Interestingly, two days before my dad died, I was in a new indie bookshop in Leigh and found a book called The Dictionary of Lost Words. I read it that Christmas and thought about it every day since. There was a suffragette backdrop to some of it and it was so beautifully, intricately researched that I felt more inspired than I had in years.

I also bizarrely returned to journalism, on a freelance basis, after he died – which gave me a good idea.

And now - here we are.

Two fantastic women in the School of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at The University of Essex have agreed to oversee my upcoming project full time. I won’t share too many details but the output of a Creative Writing PhD includes BOTH a 70,000-word novel and a 30,000-word critical commentary that accompanies that.

My research centres around the journalism of the women’s suffrage movement; in a pleasing way, drawing together a lot of the various strands of my professional life over the last decade or so into this project.

After three Fresher’s Weeks, three Student IDs, three student email accounts – what’s one more, really?!