Dr Mark Blacklock

Overview

Biography

Dr Mark Blacklock is a novelist, journalist and cultural historian, and teaches on the MA Creative Writing. He is the author of I'm Jack (London: Granta, 2015), The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and Hinton (London: Granta, 2020), and editor of The Selected Nonfiction of J.G. Ballard (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023). In 2024 he collaborated with the artist Gemme Anderson on her Artangel installation And She Built a Crooked House. He is co-editor of the literary magazine Offal and its accompanying audio-zine, made using AI text-to-voice synthesis.

Mark's books and essays have been longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize, The SFRA Pioneer Award, and the BSFA Prize for Nonfiction. I'm Jack was described in The Guardian as "an intelligent, disturbing slice of noir, which falls into no particular category" and was optioned for the screen by Mad as Birds. Hinton was described as "an extraordinary achievement." The Literry Review wrote of The Selected Nonfiction of J.G. Ballard that "Blacklock’s edition is a gift to readers in the present and the unreal future."

You can read reviews of I'm Jack here and here and a scholarly analysis of its use of textual redaction here. The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension is usefully summarised in this review. 

Mark welcomes proposals for PhD projects on genre fiction, particularly SF and crime; the use of documentary modes in modern and contemporary literature; practice-led projects in genre fiction; and theoretically-informed research projects considering contemporary cultural phenomena.

He was the course convenor of the MA in Cultural and Critical Studies for three years. 

Highlights

• J.G. Ballard, The Selected Nonfiction, edited by Mark Blacklock

• Podcast interview with Caroline Sanderson for the Royal Literary Fund

Web profiles

• My personal website
• Offal

Visiting posts

• Royal Literary Fund Fellow, University of Leeds, 09-2023 to 06-2025

Research

Research overview

My research is clustered around genre fictions, exchanges between literature and science, and cultural history and theory. I am also a novelist and my fiction tends towards genre experimentation, formal variation and the exploration of aberrant reasoning.

I am currently working on an edition of the non-fiction of the British author J.G. Ballard, drawing together his journalism, essays, commentaries and criticism, while writing my third novel.

My first monograph, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siecle, published by Oxford University Press in 2018, considers the development and popularisation of radically new geometries in the late-nineteenth century and the implications of these for the understanding of abstract space in the early twentieth century. Reading the registration of these ideas across the cultural sphere – with particular focus on literature, occult texts and popular science – it considers how newly imagined spaces were registered in cultural productions at the levels of both form and content.

I have recently published essays and chapters on Spatial Form and Weird Fiction, Dracula and the New Horror Theories, the work of the contemporary novelist Tom McCarthy, Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High Rise, and the philosophy of John le Carré. I am making an essay film that considers the pater noster lift.

My first novel, I’m Jack, was published by Granta in June 2015. I was fortunate enough to be reviewed kindly but my favourite thing anyone said about it was a blurb from Iain Sinclair:

‘Here are dark telegrams from an expertly realised otherness that is Sunderland. Spare. Swift. Smart. And dangerous. Carrying us through maps of shame to rescue a convincing fiction of the past from its sullen entropy’

My second novel will come out with the same publisher in Spring 2020. Here's hoping I can persuade someone to hymn that so beautifully. I write for the national press on literature and culture and maintain a related research interest in new directions for contemporary fiction.

From 2014-15 I worked on a collaborative research project with the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Literature. Aspects of that research can be read at the tumblr site www.thegeekpound.com.

Supervision and teaching

Teaching

Teaching modules

• Writing Workshop (ENHU039S7)

Publications