Nicholas Royle has been Professor of English at the University of Sussex since 1999. He established the MA/PhD programme in Creative and Critical Writing in 2001 and is founding director of the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought.

He has previously taught at the University of Stirling, Scotland (1992-9), the University of Tampere, Finland (1987-92) and at the University of Oxford (1981-87). He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of Santiago del Compostela (2004), Aarhus University (2005-07), the University of Manitoba (2013) and the University of Lille (2012, 2019, 2020).

Nicholas Royle has published many critical books and essays, as well as novels and short stories (including quick fictions):

Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing (2020)

Mother: A Memoir (2020)

An English Guide to Birdwatching: A Novel (2017)

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Fifth edition, 2016, co-authored with Andrew Bennett)

This Thing Called Literature (2015, co-authored with Andrew Bennett)

Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011)

Quilt: A Novel (with a Critical Afterword) (2010)

In Memory of Jacques Derrida (2009)

How to Read Shakespeare (2005, new edition 2014)

Jacques Derrida (2003)

The Uncanny (2003)

Deconstructions: A User's Guide (2000) (as editor)

E.M. Forster (1999)

After Derrida (1995)

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (1995, co-authored with Andrew Bennett)

Afterwords; Deconstruction in Finland (1992) (as editor)

Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (1990)


Royle is also an editor of the Oxford Literary Review, a journal with which he has been involved since the 1970s, and director of Quick Fictions. He is currently writing a book about Covid-19.