About
Profile
Associate Professor Paul Williams studied African literature in South Africa, Creative Writing in Wisconsin, USA and has taught in universities in South Africa, the Middle East, the UK and the USA. Paul's stories and critical articles have appeared in Meanjin, TEXT, New Writing, Social Alternatives, New Contrast and the Chicago Quarterly Review. His Young Adult mystery The Secret of Old Mukiwa won the Zimbabwe International Book Fair award in 2001 and his memoir Soldier Blue was nominated as Book of the Year, South Africa, in 2008. Recent books are Novel Ideas: Writing Innovative Fiction (Bloomsbury 2020), Twelve Days and Don't Tell (Bloodhound, 2019, 2020), Writing the Radical Memoir (Bloomsbury 2023) and Write Now (Amba Press 2025). Paul has won numerous awards for his teaching, research and creative writing, and his books have been set texts in schools and universities in Canada, UK, USA, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Professional Memberships
- NAWE (National Association of Writers in Education) UK
- AAWP (Australasian Association of Writing Programs) AU
- AWP (Association of Writing Programs) USA
Awards
- Advance Award: Advancing the Student Experience, 2014, University of the Sunshine Coast
- Carnovski African Studies Scholarship, 1989, University of the Witwatersrand
- The Dean's Humanities Award, 1994, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
- Winner — Fiction Young Adult Novel section, 2001, Zimbabwe International Book Fair
- TRIO teaching Award 2003, Blue Mountain Community College, Oregon
- Book of the Year — 2008, The Witness (South Africa)
Potential research projects for HDR and Honours students
- Postmodern fiction
- The novel / historiographic metafiction
- Creative non-fiction, particularly in relation to memoir/autobiography
- Post-colonial world literature
- Writing for children and young adults
- Creative Writing
- Creative Writing studies
Supervision of Honours and Higher Degree by Research Candidates
Associate Professor Paul Williams has supervised to completion over twenty Honours, Masters and PhD dissertations, ranging from memoir, historical fiction, science fiction, the philosophical novel, metafiction, postmodernism, postcolonialism.
Teaching areas
- Creative Writing — narrative, poetic and performative craft; children’s/ young adult literature
- Literary Studies
- The novel; experimental fiction
- Autobiography/memoir
Leadership
- Program Coordinator Bachelor of Creative Industries (Creative Writing and Publishing)
- Deputy Head of School (Research)
- Discipline Lead (Creative Industries)
Expert Media Commentary
Dr Paul Williams is a creative writer based in the UniSC School of Business and Creative Industries. His research interests encompass areas such as post colonialism and postmodernism in fiction; African literature; autobiographic / historiographic metafiction and narrative constructions of the ‘self’ and ‘other’; children’s and young adult fiction; and creative writing as a transcultural activity.
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Organisational Affiliations
Highlights - Outputs
Non-fiction
Published 2020
Chicago Quarterly Review, 30, 259 - 264
No abstract available.
Journal article
‘How to do things with words’: teaching creative writing as performance
Published 2020
New Writing, 17, 3, 284 - 296
Using Elbow's model of Expressivism and J. L. Austen's notion of writing as performance, this paper outlines how performative pedagogies of creative writing practice at our university have transformed the creative writing programme. Giving examples from classes I teach, I examine the performative aspects of teaching creativity in first year courses, in collaborative writing workshops, in literature courses for creative writers, and in courses where literary theory is taught, and demonstrate how Creative Writing is taught as a perlocutionary utterance, meaningful only in its effects and contexts, a performative act that becomes itself only in the act of doing.
Journal article
A writer’s manifesto: articulating ways of learning to write well
Published 2020
New Writing, 17, 1, 71 - 79
A writer's manifesto is a statement outlining a writer's philosophy of life, writing goals and intentions, motives, and sources of inspiration. It is also an ongoing self-reflection on how a writer learns to write well. A writing manifesto demands an interrogation of the literary, political, philosophical and material contexts of a writer's practice. This paper demonstrates how both undergraduate and post-graduate students can steer their own writing growth by writing a manifesto through an exploration of various methods of writing practice.
Edited book
Chicago Quarterly Review, Vol. 30
Published 2020
No abstract available.
Journal article
The performative textbook: writing Playing with Words
Published 2019
New Writing, 16, 1, 80 - 88
If you can't write, then teach writing. If you can't teach writing, write a book on how to teach writing. This paper explores the idea of a performative creative writing textbook, first by discussing how we wrote Playing with Words, a creative writing textbook that experiments with the discourse of textbook writing, written in several voices which dialogue with one another and with the reader in order to create an interactive reading and writing experience; secondly by examining other performative creative textbooks whose pedagogy is their practice and how they perform their premise; finally this paper argues that such performative textbooks are creative writing acts that should be counted as non-traditional research outputs.
Education
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