Marina Lewycka joined the media studies department at Sheffield Hallam about a decade ago to teach journalism and public relations. Under a scheme the university runs for its employees, she became eligible to do a free course. Aged 57 and starting to motor towards retirement, she decided to take up the offer.
"I was thinking: I've got a few years to go and that I've had all this time trying to write and not getting published. Part of me was being a bit arrogant and thinking I knew it all anyway, and a part of me thinking, well, there's nothing to lose and I've already done Excel spreadsheets and I've already done Build Your Own Website - I wasn't very good at that - so why not have a go at creative writing?"
One of her colleagues had done the creative writing MA the previous year and gave it good reviews. "There's always somebody having a go - it's a very nice thing to do," she says.
''I had very distinguished teachers - Sean O'Brien, the poet who won the TS Eliot prize recently, and Jane Rogers, the novelist, who was really very helpful and inspiring."
The work of any student recommended by a tutor to get a first - and of any predicted to fail - has to be seen by the external examiner. Lewycka was earmarked for the former. "One of the tutors phoned me and said: 'Do you mind if I give your phone number to Bill Hamilton?' He's the external examiner, and a literary agent'.
"And I felt: Oh, my goodness. So there was this terribly nerve-racking interlude between her giving him my phone number and him actually ringing me, and then when he rang me the rest of it happened very quickly. It was an almost overnight transformation after years of having been unpublished."
Marina now has a second published novel, Two Caravans.
Source: The Guardian www.guardian.co.uk