Professor Jeremy Treglown

Confidential 1:1 writing support

Each Wednesday in term, I’ll be in St Peter’s to help students with their writing. This service, which is provided by the Royal Literary Fund, not the University, is free and confidential.

My room is Emily Morris 14. To book an appointment, please write to me in the first instance at jeremy.treglown@rlfeducation.org.uk.

Writing and editing

My main qualifications are that I’ve written a number of commercially and critically successful books, have published articles and reviews in most of the main British and American broadsheet newspapers and magazines including Granta and The New Yorker, and for nine years was editor (and before that, arts editor) of The Times Literary Supplement. I’ve also been a judge of various literary awards, including Chair of the Judges of the Booker and Whitbread (later, Costa) prizes. Between 2017 and 2022 I was chair of the trustees of the Arvon Foundation, Britain’s leading non-academic provider of writing courses.  

Probably the best known of my books is a biography (the first) of Roald Dahl, which in terms of its interpretation of the man was the chief source for Mark Rosenblatt’s play Giant, now transferring to Broadway.  The most influential in encouraging other work and affecting university curricula has been Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green but I’ve also written on other people and topics, ranging from the Restoration poet Rochester to Spanish cultural life under Franco. I was responsible for the online index identifying which reviews in the TLS between 1902 and the 1970s were written anonymously by whom – a useful tool for anyone researching that period.

Which leads me to:   

University teaching

These days there’s much more crossover than there used to be between academia and other careers and, while at different times I’ve been either a salaried literary journalist or a freelance, I’m lucky enough to have spent more than half my working life in universities.  

I may also be the oldest alumnus of St Peter’s (1967-70) ever to have returned to the college as a tutor. After my first degree here, I was a graduate student at Hertford College and became a lecturer at Lincoln before moving to the English Department at UCL.  Later, following a period as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, I was Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick, where, with the poet David Morley, I began the Warwick Writing Programme.