Professor Ruth Gilligan

• PhD English, University of Exeter (2014)
• MA Creative Writing, University of East Anglia (2011)
• MA English, Yale University (2010)
• BA English, Cambridge University (2009)

Professor Ruth Gilligan published her debut novel Forget at the age of eighteen, becoming the youngest ever person to reach number one on the Irish bestsellers’ list. Since then she has published four more novels which have been translated into multiple languages and shortlisted for an array of international prizes.

Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Wasifiri, The Istanbul Review, The Irish Pages, Ambit and Banshee. She also write regular literary reviews for The Guardian and The Irish Independent where she was a columnist for a number of years.

Her debut play, We Love and Then We Drown – a love story set against the backdrop of the climate crisis – was first performed in London in January 2026 and will appear at the Camden Fringe, Edinburgh Fringe and Bloomsbury Festivals later this year.

For more information, please visit Professor Gilligan's website.

Professor Gilligan teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate Creative Writing modules, and has a particular interest in intertextuality, structure & form and writing for the stage.

Professor Gilligan would be interested in receiving proposals for postgraduate projects on any themes related to my research (eg. structure & form; empathy & writing the ‘other’; intertextuality; storytelling for the climate crisis). Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with any queries!

Professor Gilligan's novels braid together multiple timelines and points of view to tell character-led stories set against the backdrop of particular moments in Irish history. Her critical research, meanwhile, examines the formal strategies of other contemporary Irish novelists such as Colum McCann, Eimear McBride and Maggie O’Farrell.

Professor Gilligan has long been interested in the concept of empathy and its relationship to narrative form; more recently this has evolved to consider how different modes of storytelling seek to engage with the climate emergency – which in turn led to her writing her first ever work for the stage.

Since joining the university, Professor Gilligan has partnered with a number of national and international charities whose work focuses on literacy, storytelling and empathy. These include Narrative 4, Empathy Museum and the National Literacy Trust with whom the university launched a formal partnership in 2019. These collaborations served as the basis for an Impact Case Study in REF2021. Meanwhile, since 2023 she has been the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Lead for the College of Arts & Law.