Dr. Christine Lehnen

You may find my CV and a complete list of publications here.

• Hamburg Lectures in Creative Writing: Christine has secured funding to launch a new lecture series in Creative Writing, the first of its kind in Germany. Once a year, the Department for English and American Studies will invite a celebrated international writer working in English to speak on a topic related to writing, books, and literature to students, academics, and the wider public. The first speaker will be the Irish novelist and essayist Caitriona Lally. Caitriona is the author of Eggshell (2017), Wunderland (2021) and Home Economics (2026). In 2018, she was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. She will be speaking on the subject of "Working Women, Working Writers" at the Faculty of Philosophy in Hamburg on 3 July 2026.
  
  
• Hamburg Centre for New Writing: Christine is aiming to launch the Hamburg Centre for New Writing. The Centre will bring together a variety of activities aimed at nurturing Hamburg's students into professional writers, including the Hamburg Lectures in Creative Writing, the Hamburg Visiting Fellow in Poetry, the launch of the Hamburg Review, and the Hamburg Prize in Creative Writing for best creative prose piece by a student, to be awarded in cooperation with a leading UK literary agency.

I am pleased to support international PhD research in Creative Writing and welcome approaches from universities and candidates abroad, particularly in the United Kingdom, regarding opportunities for co-supervision or examination. Doctoral supervision is not formally part of my duties at the University of Hamburg at present, but I remain available for supervision and examination for partners in the UK and beyond.

My areas of expertise include book-length prose fiction, experimental fiction, political writing, historical fiction and narrative non-fiction. I have a particular interest in projects that examine the shape of the twenty-first-century littérature engagée and in writers exploring how prose can engage with the fundamental issues of our time. 

I am also available to act as an external examiner for PhD dissertations in Creative Writing and have previously examined doctoral candidates in creative writing and historical fiction at the Universities of Kent and East Anglia.

2026 - 2031:  Fellow of the UK Young Academy, Royal Society (link to the announcement, March 2026)

2015: Young Academies of Europe, Prize Question: "Who Gets Carried Away by Europe?". First Prize for  "Zeus/Europa" (short story).