Mr Luke Williams

Overview

Biography

Luke Williams is a lecturer teaching prose fiction and creative-critical work across all Birkbeck’s Creative Writing programmes. He has been involved, since its initiation, in Birkbeck’s Compass project, which supports people with backgrounds in forced migrancy who would like to continue their education at university. He works within literary, visual art and community contexts, and tries to integrate these elements in his practice.

Luke is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he met Natasha Soobramanien, with whom he now co-writes. Their novel Diego Garcia was published jointly by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Semiotext(e) in 2022 and won that year's Goldsmith's Prize. Their collaboration began with Luke’s first novel The Echo Chamber (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin 2011), for which Natasha wrote two chapters. The novel won the 2011 Saltire Award for Best First Book.

Luke has been involved in a number of public projects engaged with the contested space between literature and art, such as the events series Plastic Words at Raven Row.

Constituting publics and considering forms of community are increasingly central to his practice. In this he is influenced by Black Studies scholarship. Collaborative writing is one of the ways in which he tries to push back against forms of individualism.

His experience of community projects began with Akwaaba, a social centre for refugees and migrants in Hackney, where he first worked on a bike maintenance project before setting up a storytellers’ group. The group went on to develop a collaborative text which was performed at Stoke Newington Literary Festival, and subsequently published in Tales of Two Londons.  

Honours and awards

• Goldsmith's Prize, Goldsmith's, September 2022
• Saltire First Novel of the Year, Saltire Society Literary Awards, September 2011

Research

Research overview

Luke's research interests are collaborative writing, creative-critical writing and politics and narratives of migration. 

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

4

Current doctoral researchers

• AZAD SHARMA

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, May 2024 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Post-Apartheid as Method: Late Colonialism, Creolisation, and Creative-Critical Literary Testimony.

  Description:

  My practice-based PhD will produce a novel which explores Post-Apartheid traumas across different generations and scales, from world-historical to personal. It focuses on a tri-generational London-based family and juxtaposes older generation’s memories of Apartheid with challenges faced by a graduate student in the wake of Brexit. It captures unique transnational experiences of a twice-displaced racialised community. I use interdisciplinary research, allowing critical discourse to inform creative narrative. I work with: Apartheid-era memoirs, field interviews, trauma and affect theories, phenomenologies of touch (haptics), human rights, race politics, and archival records of Indian-South-African activists. The novel is prefaced by a critical foreword which explores the ongoing ramifications of colonialism in the 21st Century UK in which culture is seen as a space geared towards war, racism, and ethnic absolutism. 

• ROGELIO BRAGA

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2020 onwards

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• LILY DUNN

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2015 to Sep 2017

  Title of thesis:

  The Aesthetic of Hybrid Literary Memoir, and its Relationship to Healing: Is There a Contradiction Between Writing Well and Writing to Get Well?

  Awarded:

  2023

Teaching

Teaching modules

• Fiction Workshop: The Contemporary Novel (AREN139S6)
• Writing The Self (AREN238S7)

Publications