Nell Stevens is an award-winning author of memoir and fiction. Her work has been awarded the Somerset Maugham Award, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted by the BBC National Short Story Award.
She is the author of two novels, The Original and Briefly, a Delicious Life, and two memoirs: Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me.
Her writing is published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. Nell is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.
Nell lives in Oxfordshire with her wife and two children.
Background
Nell studied English and Creative Writing at Warwick University, before spending a postgraduate year at Harvard as a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow in Arabic Language and Comparative Literature.
In her early twenties she worked in human rights, before returning to academia to complete an MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, followed by an MFA in Fiction at Boston University, where she was awarded the Marcia Trimble Fellowship and a Leslie Epstein Global Fellowship in Fiction. She returned to the UK for an AHRC-funded PhD in English Literature at King’s College London, and undertook part of her research at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, supported by the AHRC International Placement Scheme.
Her teaching career began at Boston University, where she taught creative writing during her MFA and subsequent summer schools. After completing her PhD, she joined Goldsmiths as a Lecturer in Creative and Life Writing, before moving to Warwick, where she is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing and, from January 2026, Director of the Warwick Writing Programme.