• Write for Suite101
• Sign In

• Home
• Profile

Dr Val Williamson - photo by Helen Williamson

Dr. Val Williamson has published articles on many topics in newspapers, magazines, journals and anthologies.

Her writing has been broadcast on radio, and she has published and won awards for writing short stories and children’s stories. Writing has been Val’s pleasure since childhood, and she is a creative writing tutor at writers’ seminars and weekends, including Swanwick Writers' Summer School, and has become a seasoned competition judge.

Following a career in primary school teaching and raising her two children, Val returned to Education to gain a first class degree in English with Film Studies and Creative Writing, followed by a PhD in Communication and Cultural history, awarded in 2003. She has published on varied aspects of popular fictions, including articles in writers’ publications, chapters in academic books and research into audiences and authors across various media. You can find her chapters in Consuming for Pleasure, Medical Fictions, Gendering Library History, Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the Twenty First Century, Relocating Britishness and Judging a Book by its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction.

Until retirement, Dr. Williamson was a university senior lecturer, teaching about popular narrative, the culture industries, especially film, television and multi-platform fandom, media and communication theory, media identities and British cultural history. Take a look at her resource at the Medal Project on researching childhood media consumption, and try her academic writing articles such as, Writing the Annotated Bibliography

Val was trained to teach film-making in schools and later learned to write animated games for her family. More recently, she took part in assessment panels of practical work by student animators, advertisers, and film-makers, and taught Masters level student animators and digital film-makers about narrative structures and visual narrative media. Try out her Armchair Muse blogzine and dip into her Film School articles on Suite101, like Independent Women Movie Directors: Ida Lupino or her collection of articles on disaster movies for exams.

Valerie Williamson