Dr Ian Sansom | Culture Northern Ireland

Dr Ian Sansom

Dr Ian Sansom, Writer-In-Residence at Queen's University, Belfast

LISTEN to Ian Sansom in conversation with Gavin Carville.

This interview is part of the CultureNorthernIreland Podcast.

The School of English and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University have announced the appointment of Dr Ian Sansom as BBC Writer-In-Residence for a term of three years.

Dr Sansom hails from Essex but lives in Bangor with his family.

Educated at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge under the tutelage of John Fuller, Sansom made a name for himself as a prolific reviewer for newspapers and periodicals such as The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The London Review of Books and Poetry Review.

Dr Sansom is also the founder and editor of The Enthusiast, whose publications include The Enthusiast Almanack (2006).

He is a regular contributor to programmes on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 and his essays have appeared in various books, journals and magazines.

Dr Sansom is the author of the non-fiction book The Truth About Babies (2002), loosely based on Cyril Connolly's postmodernist masterpiece Enemies of Promise.

He has also published the novels Cortex (2000) and Ring Road (2004), and the Mobile Library detective series, The Mobile Library: The Case of the Missing Books (2006), and The Mobile Library: Mr Dixon Disappears (2006), both set in NI.

Dr Sansom is currently at work on a third book in the Mobile Library Detective Series entitled The Delegates' Choice. A further seven Mobile Detective novels are on the cards.

As part of his responsibilities as Writer-In-Residence with Queen's University, Dr Sansom will conduct the Queen's Writers Group and will be collaborating with the BBC on a number of projects, including the Louis MacNeice Centenary in 2007.