Andrew Cowan (writer)

Andrew Cowan (born 1960) is an English novelist and nonfiction author, who directed the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia in 2008–18.^[1] His six novels include Pig (1994).

Andrew Cowan was born in Corby, Northamptonshire, in 1960, and educated at Beanfield Comprehensive and the University of East Anglia (UEA).^[2] He graduated from UEA with a BA in English & American Studies in 1983 and an MA in creative writing in 1985. His teachers on the MA were Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.

He was a tutor for the Arvon Foundation, and later the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at UEA for three years.^[3] He was appointed to the UEA faculty in 2004,^[4] and was the director of the UEA Creative Writing programme in 2008–18; he was promoted to a chair in 2012.^[5] He retired in 2023.^[2]

He is also a potter.^[6]

His first novel, Pig (1994), won a Betty Trask Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Authors' Club First Novel Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award, and was shortlisted for five other literary awards.^[7] Common Ground (1996) and Crustaceans (2000) both received Arts Council bursaries.^{[citation needed]} What I Know was the recipient of an Arts Council Writers' Award and was published in 2005.^{[citation needed]} His fifth novel, Worthless Men, was published in 2013, and his sixth novel, Your Fault, in 2019.^[8]

His creative writing guidebook, The Art of Writing Fiction, was published in 2011, with a revised edition appearing in 2023. His monograph Against Creative Writing was published in 2022.

• Official website
• Professor Andrew Cowan at British Council: Literature
• Andrew Cowan Archive, University of East Anglia
• Interview with Andrew Cowan: ”Our characters have our DNA”
• Andrew Cowan Interview | Richard Beard