Willy Maley is a Glasgow academic and writer. He is currently Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, where he has worked since 1994. Willy has lectured and published on a wide range of Renaissance writers including Spenser and Shakespeare, and on modern Irish and Scottish writers such as James Connolly, James Joyce, Teresa Deevy, Marina Carr, Leila Aboulela, Peter Mullan, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Muriel Spark.

His research interests cover a similarly wide range, from national and colonial identities in 16th and 17th century literature through to the modern African novel. He is currently working on a research project on John Milton and Empire entitled Mapping Milton, and on a collaborative project with David Baker and Pat Palmer on early modern Irish networks and collective biography called MACMORRIS (Mapping Actors and Contexts: Modelling Research in Renaissance Ireland in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century). MACMORRIS is a digital-humanities project that seeks to map the full range of Irish cultural activity, across languages and ethnic groups, from 1541 to 1691.

Willy’s writing is not confined to academic work. He is also a playwright, poet and journalist. He founded the Creative Writing postgraduate programme at the University of Glasgow with Philip Hobsbaum in 1995. Two of his plays – From the Calton to Catalonia, co-written with his brother John, and The Lions of Lisbon, written with Ian Auld – have had recent reprints and revivals, with further public performances of these and other plays in the pipeline. Collaborative work is Willy’s trademark.