I was born in Hampshire in 1945, and spent my childhood in Gosport, a small naval town the other side of the harbour from Portsmouth. When I was twelve we moved to Alsager, a town near the Potteries, and I went to Sandbach School. I read English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and married Jo in my third year there. After graduating I taught for a year at a language school, then went to Exeter University to begin work on my Ph.D. In 1970 we went to the States and I spent two years as an American Council of Learned Societies’ Fellow at Harvard, working on the utopian theories of the New England Transcendentalists

After Harvard we came back to England and I started work as a lecturer in American literature at Manchester University. I was there until 1999, though we spent a year in Libya and, later, at the University of Missouri. Most of the time we lived in Stockport, which is the setting for almost all of my novels, but for three and a half years we lived in Shropshire, near Market Drayton, and I commuted to Manchester.

From the late 80s onwards I started teaching creative writing as well as American literature at Manchester, working with Michael Schmidt, the poet and publisher, to develop a programme at undergraduate level, and then inaugurating an MA in Creative Writing. When our two children, William and Helen, were in their final year at university, we decided it was time to make a move, and I took up an appointment at Bath Spa University College, where I am Professor of Creative Writing, teaching fiction writing on the MA.

Blackpool Vanishes (novel), (London: Faber, 1979; London: Panther, 1980 [pb]; London: Fontana Flamingo, 1988 [pb]).

Blackpool has been visited for years by tiny beings in flying saucers so small they are mistaken for spots before the eyes, invaders from inner rather than outer space. Only one local resident realises what’s going on and his reports, couched in verse, are not taken seriously by the Alien Beings Section of the Foreign Office until too late, when the whole resort is suddenly whisked away.

Daggerman (novel), (London: Faber, 1980; London: Panther, 1981 [pb]; New York: Pantheon, 1982; New York: Avon, 1983 [pb]; Tokyo: Hayakawa Novels, 1983).

Turner is luckless: run over by the school lawn mower; shooting a cow with a pencil that has his name carved on it; disgracing himself at Suez; losing his job. Finally it is all too much. He makes himself a knife; fashions a leatherette jerkin with DAGGERMAN in studs on the back; contrives a new religion of the Third Alternative in which he has the starring role; and embarks on his career as a psychopathic killer.

The Enormous Dwarf (novel), (London: Granada, 1982).

A book about the ultimate loss, and the only task that remains after it has been  suffered: to find out how and why it happened, to reconstruct the event. This is a  detective story about the act of detection itself, and the motive behind it, about our need to retrace our history so that we can find ways of living with it.

The Whispering Gallery (novel), (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984; New York: W.W. Norton, 1984; London: Corgi Black Swan, 1985 [pb]).

Space shuttle astronauts whirl away into the cosmos, only able to tune into Radio 3, a heart surgeon gets blown up in a Manchester restaurant, there’s a road accident that won’t stop happening, a nightmarish dinner party in Antarctica, a tiny protozoan that could transform the economy or destroy the world. The people, situations, and events of this novel are as ill-assorted, surreal and extreme as today’s news, yet somehow they are all connected by the Fat Man, a large figure nobody seems to notice. Perhaps what you read in the newspapers is true after all . . .

Swansong (novel), (London: Collins, 1986; New York: Atheneum, 1986; London: Fontana Flamingo, 1987 [pb]).

This novel (the author’s preferred title is Songs for Yomping) ranges freely over eighties Britain, from raucous self-loathing punk rocker Premo Bulge, to Jack and Queen, an elderly Battersea couple involved in the bacon and greengrocery trades, and their unexpected connection to the Prime Minister, Mrs Cheeseman, with her mysterious pearl earrings. The Third Sex is at last revealed; an eighteenth century rake finds himself in a twentieth century war; a clergyman has a life-changing vision of his own tooth – and everything and everybody inevitably triangulates towards the Farquhar Islands, where the locals have bobble hats and priapic teapots, and British culture finally sinks beneath the waves.

Revolution, commissioned by Transworld Publishers, and published under the Bantam imprint in New York (1986) and London (1987), and in Paris by Editions J'ai Lu (1987).

Book of the film directed by Hugh Hudson and starring Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland and Nastassja Kinski. Screenplay by Robert Dillon.

The Land Where Lost Things Go, (novel), (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990).

Olive Watson is an out-of-print writer of children’s stories. In 1975, as an old woman, she sits down to write the first and only draft of her last work, The Land Where Lost Things Go.  In it, we encounter three versions of the same person: a little girl living with her family in Cornwall before the first world war, a fictional child wandering through a landscape of witches and trolls, and an old lady who spies on the milkman, battles with her kitchen, and confronts her last living relative, who comes out of the lost world she has been exploring to claim her.

Taking Apart the Poco Poco (novel), (London: Fourth Estate, 1995; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995; London: Fourth Estate, 1996[pb]).

Thursday morning. Each member of the Edwards family opens the front door of their ordinary house in turn . . . and steps into the unknown. John finds himself facing one of the crucial decisions of his life as he lunches on crab paste sandwiches with the enigmatic Mrs Clarke, while Margaret, his wife, discovers both terror and passion at the breast clinic of the local hospital; their teenage daughter Ann experiences religious visions and sexual threats on the way to an evangelical hoe-down, and eight-year-old Stephen is deflected from his journey to school and ends up in the clutches of the unpredictable blotherin man. Only Raymond the dog has a glimmer of what is going on, and he’s suffering from a romantic entanglement of his own.

Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands and Walden (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

An academic book which studies three utopian experiments undertaken  in Massachusetts in the 1840s, all of which represented attempts by a group of thinkers known as the New England Transcendentalists to reconcile the contingent world of history with what they saw as the stable structure of nature.

editor: The Claudius Novels of Robert Graves (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998)

With an introductory essay on how Graves came to write his I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

Fat Hen (novel) (London: Fourth Estate, 1999; London, Fourth Estate, 2000 [pb]).

Like Taking Apart the Poco Poco, this is a novel of family life, but in this case the time-scale is eight years (1947-55) rather than a single day.  In fact the story begins half a century earlier, when young Ernest Willis commits an act of betrayal which threads its way through the lives of all concerned. Now a grandfather, Ernie is obsessed by judicial executions, along with the novels of Walter Scott in which he tries to discover clues to his own life, while his daughter Rose has an experience with another woman for which she can find no words at all. Meanwhile her husband Jack lives a double life funded by a discovery made in a secondhand piano, and young Donald, their son, struggles towards adolescence, convinced he actually died at the age of six.

"The Rialto," (short story) in The City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1999)

Ann the Word: The Story of Ann Lee, Female Messiah, Mother of the Shakers, The Woman Clothed with the Sun (biography) (London: Fourth Estate, 2000; New York: Arcade, 2001; Penguin: New York, 2002)

Ann Lee was one of the most extraordinary and mysterious women in the history of western culture – probably the most influential artisan woman since Joan of Arc. The illiterate daughter of a Manchester blacksmith, she sailed to America on the eve of the Revolution. She and her tiny band of followers settled in upstate New York where, after years of poverty and isolation, converts began flocking to their log cabin. She was arrested as a British spy and tormented by angry mobs, but nevertheless remained firm in her claim to be the messiah in female form, and began an epic journey through New England towards the spiritual home she had seen in a vision.

Richard Francis’s own adaptation of Ann the Word was serialised as Book of the Week on Radio 4 (21-25 August 2000)

Prospect Hill (novel) (London: Fourth Estate, January 2003)

Costford, 1970. Trevor Morgan is a labour councillor with magical teeth and the political flair to get to the top. But his marriage is in crisis, and he seeks help from an unexpected quarter: doughty middle-aged May Rollins, a Tory councillor living with the demented mother she has always hated. Strange things are happening to May: she sees a lollipop lady at eight o’clock on an August evening; her TV converts to colour of its own accord. She and Trevor are at odds over a controversial plan to build council flats at Prospect Hill, but their relationship nevertheless abruptly - and ambiguously - intensifies. Then we have Art Whiteside, the romantic estate agent, Wendy Hammond, who gave up teaching to become a waitress then gave up that to baby-sit her grandmother, and the silent and dangerous Fray Bentley, Town Hall bouncer and lover of Party Fours.

A novel about the relationship between public and private life, about mothers, wives, lovers, houses and households.

A Biography of Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), commissioned by Fourth Estate.

Sewall is most famous as one of the judges at the Salem witch trials, the only one of the eight to stand up in church and confess that a terrible miscarriage of justice had taken place. That confession can be seen as a defining moment in the birth of the modern world. Sewall was also the author of the first attack on slavery in English, a defender of Indian rights, a devoted family man, a clumsy and comical wooer, one of the first American tourists in England, the custodian of Captain Kidd’s treasure – all in all a many-sided, articulate, humane man, ironically implicated in one of the most notorious episodes in American history. This book will explore why the authorities reacted to the witchcraft accusations in the way they did, and map out the character of a classic second-generation American, a man who embodied the puritan spiritual values of the founders of the colony, and looked forward to the pragmatic and revolutionary attitudes of the eighteenth century.

I wrote a TV play for Granada TV which was broadcast nationally on the ITV network in 1983: Bingo, starring Benjamin Whitrow and Gwen Taylor.

I broadcast regularly on BBC radio, contributing to programmes like FRONT ROW and NIGHT WAVES, and presenting my own programmes on literary topics.