is Director of the graduate creative writing programme at the University of Oxford. She is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer, and her publications include a novel, A Touch of the Other and a collection of stories, An Affair of the Heart. Her stories have been widely anthologized including in the British Council New Writing series and The New Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories, and have been commissioned by BBC Radio 4. She has run workshops and given presentations throughout the USA, continental Europe and in Japan on her current research interest, poetry and business, which she has been investigating in conjunction with the Strategy Institute of The Boston Consulting Group. A book on the subject, titled What Poetry Brings to Business, is forthcoming with University of Michigan Press (2009). Other publications include essays on Romance and the Post-Modern Novel (Blackwells) and Willa Cather and George Orwell (Scribners), and on Virginia Woolf. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and is a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.