Teaching

Midge Gillies first decided to teach creative writing as a way of “getting out of the house”, but discovered she enjoyed the experience so much that it is now a key part of her working life, alongside writing.

In 2023 she was commissioned by the Professional Writing Academy (PWA) to create an online Writing Memoir Workshop for Granta and now teaches the programme to writers around the world.

She has taught for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, based at Madingley Hall, for about twenty-five years and was, until recently, Academic Director of Creative Writing. In 2019 she was awarded the Pilkington Prize for Excellence in Teaching and in 2021 she was shortlisted and highly commended for Inclusive Practice in the Cambridge Student Union Student-Led Teaching Awards. She is proud to have taught a huge range of writers, each with different goals, and to have worked with published writers including Sara Collins, Jill Damatac and AF Steadman.

As an Assistant Teaching Professor she teaches on the Master’s and diploma programmes and supervises dissertation students. She is part of the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching Creative Writing – a programme she helped to set up with Dr Lucy Durneen – which encourages creative writing in settings such as hospitals, prisons and community centres.

Midge runs the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Creative Writing’s “In conversation with . . .” series of free, online talks with leading writers. She enjoys talking to different groups of people about creative writing and sharing her passion for social history.  In the past year, for example, she’s spoken to students from schools in Brent, North London, about Amy Johnson and other “women of renown”; discussed the therapeutic benefits of writing and reading at a conference in Cambridge organised by Maggie’s, which supports people with cancer, and talked to Mildenhall Library in Suffolk about the famous air race of 1934.

She was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge for three years and is a mentor for Gold Dust. Midge was a judge and mentor for the Escalator Programme, Norwich Writers’ Centre (formerly the New Writing Partnership). She ran the Guardian/UEA programme on life writing and has also taught for Anglia Ruskin and the University of East Anglia.

Midge discusses Amy Johnson at the premiere of the Brent Women of Renown documentary short.

Madingley Hall, home to the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, where Midge teaches.

Students from Kingsbury High School in North London take part in a creative writing exercise led by Midge at the RAF Museum in Hendon.