Dr Rob Magnuson Smith

Rob Magnuson Smith is a novelist and short story writer. His debut novel The Gravedigger (UNO Press) won the Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Award and was followed by Scorper (Granta Books) in 2015 and Seaweed Rising (Sandstone Press) in 2023. His short fiction appears widely and was awarded the 2015 Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Prize (also longlisted for the 2016 Times EFG Short Story Award). Rob has written investigative journalism for publications including the Guardian, Granta and Playboy. He is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the Cornwall campus.

Biography:

Rob Magnuson Smith holds a BA in philosophy and a BA in psychology from Pitzer College in Claremont, California, an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia (David Higham Award) and a PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University (International Doctoral Research Fellow).

HIs debut novel The Gravedigger was published in 2010 after winning the Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Award. His second novel Scorper was published by Granta in 2015. The Independent called Scorper 'an odd, original, darkly comic novel...Kafka crossed with Flann O'Brien'. His third novel Seaweed Rising was published by Sandstone in 2023. Nicholas Royle called the book 'Wonderfully strange...at once a moving love story and an ecological reverie of Ballardian intensity.'

Rob's short fiction has appeared most recently in Ploughshares, Granta, The Clearing, the Guardian, MoMA Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, The Literarian, Fiction International, The Reader, The Istanbul Review, The Greensboro Review, Guillemot Press and the Australian Book Review after winning the Elizabeth Jolley Award.

Rob has written investigative journalism for Playboy Magazine on Soviet-era primate hybridization experiments, the scientific search for alien life, and the book repository underpinning the Internet Archive. His article 'Why Every English Village Needs a Pub' was commissioned by the Guardian. He has been Writer-in-Residence at The Eden Project and Cuckmere Haven SOS, an Arts Fellow in the Arctic Circle Residency and Writer-in-Residence at the Museum of Life Sciences at Kings College London. 

Rob is Senior Lecturer at Exeter’s Cornwall campus and teaches on the new Environmental Humanities degree. He also supervises undergraduate and postgraduate Creative Writing dissertations. In 2019/20 he was Visiting Professor of Environmental Writing at Vassar College in New York.