Tom Benn

Tom Benn is an award-winning author, screenwriter, and Associate Professor in Crime Writing. His first novel, The Doll Princess (Cape), was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Portico Prize, and longlisted for the CWA’s John Creasey Dagger. His other novels include Chamber Music (Cape) and Trouble Man (Cape). He won runner-up prize in the 2019 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, and his essays and fiction have appeared in Granta and the Paris Review. He won the BFI’s iWrite scheme for emerging screenwriters. His first film, 'Real Gods Require Blood', premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Short Film at the BFI London Film Festival. His fourth novel, Oxblood (Bloomsbury), was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the CWA's Gold Dagger, and in 2023 won the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award. He has new fiction in The Book of Manchester (Comma Press, 2024) and Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror (Chatto, 2025).

Crime writing, especially classic and revisionist noir, hardboiled and pulp fiction; hybrid and experimental crime narratives; fiction that disrupts conventional genre ontology and aesthetics by approaching genre(s) from the outside in, rather than the inside out; working-class writing and subcultures; regional and vernacular fiction from marginalised perspectives; transgressive literature; innovative horror and weird fiction; hauntology; Southern Gothic fiction, particularly the works of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy; Latin American, Caribbean and West African fiction that breaks into or out of genres.

BA (hons) English Literature with Creative Writing, University of East Anglia (First)

MA Creative Writing: Prose Fiction, University of East Anglia (Distinction)

Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice (PG-CERT)