William Timothy "Willy" Maley (born 2 December 1960, in Glasgow, Scotland) is a Scottish literary critic, editor, teacher and writer.
Maley grew up in a modest family home, one where there were no limits on what was read, from American Pulp to the collected works of Marx and Lenin, from Enid Blyton to Joseph Stalin, and the classics in-between.
Maley graduated from Strathclyde with First Class Honours with Distinction, winning the Meston Prize for the top degree result in his academic year.
[citation needed] In October 1985, after a summer working at the British Film Institute in London, Maley went to Jesus College, Cambridge, earning a PhD for his thesis, Marx and Spenser: Elizabeth and the Problem of Imperial Power, which was later renamed Edmund Spenser and Cultural Identity in Early Modern Ireland.
To the question of how he went from drawing income support in Possilpark in 1991 to Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow in eight years, Maley replied: "You mean, What took me so long?