Roisin Dunnett

Excellent teaching and mentorship

My favourite part of the degree was the excellent teaching and mentorship I received from the teaching staff. There was really good feedback on work, robust teaching of the craft of writing, critical reading, and self-examination of practice, and lively and interesting talks and exercises. 

I also really enjoyed the workshop element and working with my peers, many of whom I am still in contact with and share writing with. I enjoyed the mixed discipline element too, studying alongside poets and life writers.

Advice for future students

Enthusiasm for the subject helps tremendously. Based on my experience on the MA, I would also say that when it comes to postgraduate education, students and teachers with a variety of life experiences contribute to a lively and interesting atmosphere, helping to produce accomplished writers, so I would advise people to see everything they have done before the MA as an asset.

Life after Goldsmiths

My debut novel, A Line You Have Traced, is due to be published in April in UK, US and Canada by Oneworld, Feminist Press and Knopf (PRH) respectively. As a result of these deals, I was able to spend a large part of 2024 working as an author.

I also now work as a librarian in a primary school, running the library and teaching literacy classes to children between the ages of 6 and 11. I really enjoy working with students and giving them the tools to access literature they enjoy. I do a bit of creative writing with them too.

A Line You Have Traced

I produced most of the first draft of my debut novel while at Goldsmiths:

In a silverware shop, a young wife works alongside her husband. Amid growing political turmoil, Bea finds solace in the local marsh, where she is visited recurrently by a mysterious presence, logging each appearance carefully in a scarlet journal.

Publisher blurb:

In a time like now, Kay navigates friendship, queerness and the temporary job market, whilst contemplating the significance of her life in a world with such an uncertain future. At her grandmother’s house she finds an intriguing record of an angel’s visits.

A hundred years into the future, outsiders have banded together to live off-grid away from a corrupt government and a city wracked by oppression and climate change. When Ess is chosen for a virgin mission, a journey into the past to save the present, she is guided only by a well-thumbed red notebook…

Set against the shifting landscape of East London marshes and expanding over three centuries, this is the breathtaking, urgent story of three women separated by history but threaded together by unknown forces.