Name Martin Goodman Role Journalist | Education Lancaster University | |
Books I Was Carlos Castaneda, Suffer and Survive, Look Who's Watching, On Sacred Mountains, In Search of the Divine M | ||
Martin J. Goodman (born in Leicester in 1956) is an English journalist and writer.
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Early life
He completed his PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University in 2007, and now teaches at the University of Hull, where he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the now defunct Philip Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing in 2009.
Career
Martin Goodman once taught on the distance learning MA at Lancaster University, where he worked on the British Council Crossing Borders scheme as a mentor to writers in Kenya and Zimbabwe. He had homes in Bedfordshire, France, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Goodman's novel On Bended Knees (Macmillan, 1992) was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award (won by Jeff Torrington's Swing Hammer Swing).
His next books published were all non-fiction, often on a spiritual theme and published at first in America. He wrote a biography of Mother Meera, In Search of the Divine Mother.'His book I Was Carlos Castaneda recounted his experiences with shamanism and the plant hallucinogen ayahuasca. On Sacred Mountains is a round-the-world travelogue and journey of spiritual awakening. The Guardian review stated: "Either an important spiritual document, or an admonitory example of the effects of oxygen deprivation."
His next novels were Slippery When Wet, from Transita in Oxford; Look Who's Watching from Caffeine Nights, and Ectopia from Barbican Press. He started Barbican Press with the slogan "Writing from the Discomfort Zone", with a list of novels written as PhDs inspired by his being external examiner for D.D. Johnston at the University of Gloucestershire. The first novel published was Johnston's The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub.
He was one of the AHRC / BBC New Generation Thinkers in 2012–13. His two-part Radio 4 series show The New North aired in 2013 and he wrote about the buildings in the North of England in the BBC online news magazine. He worked with his friend Greg Wise to adapt the poem of his predecessor at Hull, Christopher Reid, "The Song of Lunch", for television, credited as development consultant. Martin Goodman gave a reading from his new novel on vampires at the Bram Stoker Birthday Conference in Whitby in November 2013. As Director of the defunct Philip Larkin Centre he ran major public interview sessions in Hull with writers such as Hilary Mantel, Steven Saylor, Christopher Hampton, Emma Thompson, Irene Sabatini, Kate Mosse, David Almond, Lachlan Mackinnon, Edna O'Brien. He started the Annual Children's Writing Event in Hull, working first of all with Emma Thompson and the Hull Children's Flood Project and then with David Almond of Eastfield Primary, Sidney Smith School and the Migraine Trust.
In 2011 he joined the Man Booker Prize Foundation University Initiative, bringing D.B.C. Pierre to Hull to speak about his novel Vernon God Little, after distributing a copy of the book to all first-year students at Hull and on film at Scarborough.
Awards
Martin Goodman has been awarded a Scottish Arts Council Writer's Bursary, and Travel Awards from the Scottish Arts Council and the Society of Authors. His first novel On Bended Knees was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. His biography of the Scottish scientist and serial self-experimenter John Scott Haldane, Suffer and Survive, won 1st Prize, Basis of Medicine in the 2008 BMA Book Awards He was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant in 2010 for a biography of Taezan Maezumi Roshi. His play Feeding the Roses won in Virtual Theatre's "Pen is a Mighty Sword" international playwriting competition in 2007, for "innovative plays that question the status quo and shed light on today's challenges". A major two-year research grant, from the MacIntosh Foundation of Washington DC, USA, is funding a life writing project (2013–15), detailing how a group of public interest lawyers are working throughout Europe and West Africa to tackle urgent environmental issues such as loss of biodiversity and climate change.