Graham Holderness

He was one of the founders of British Cultural materialism, a pioneer of critical-creative writing, and a significant contributor to interdisciplinary work in Literature and Theology.

He attended Jesus College, Oxford, where he obtained a First Class Degree in English language and literature.

In doing so, he seeks to counter "conservative views of early post-Second World War theatres and academics and to raise awareness that all textual appropriation and examination have a political dimension.

His more recent work has pioneered methods of critical-creative writing, exemplified by his innovative factual-fictional biography Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011),[14] which pairs critical chapters on biographical themes, with short stories on the same topic, written in styles as diverse as those of Dan Brown and Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway and Jonathan Swift.

Extending these methods, and published in 2014, are Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge University Press, June 2014),[15] which includes a story about Shakespeare's Richard II being performed on board the ship the Red Dragon during the Third Voyage of the East India Company, and a re-writing of Coriolanus as a James Bond adventure; and Re-writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, November 2014),[16] which incorporates a new historical life of Jesus, Ecce Homo.