Craig Taylor

Currently there are six published novels out there I’ll admit to having written – two of which have been optioned for the screen.

In 2024, worn out by our hyperactive visual culture – and despite having no skills or experience – I started making super-slow, zero-budget experimental short films, guided by a single slogan: the slow and the spurious, not the fast and the furious. So far they’ve won Best Experimental Film at nine international festivals.

I co-wrote the horror film Writers Retreat, set at an isolated creative-writing retreat in Essex, and have been paid cold hard cash to write other scripts for film and TV.

In 2015 the British Library installed spyware on my laptop to record the writing of my novel Staying On – an experiment repeated in 2025 with the University of Antwerp, where I’m undertaking a doctorate in creativity and literature with Professor Dirk van Hulle.

I love Belgium.

I’m Senior Lecturer at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing, where I run the following courses:

For many years I wrote editorial reports on fiction for writers, and for many years more I was a structural editor of fiction for publishers – many hundreds of writers, many tens of published novels. I’ve ghostwritten crime fiction for an internationally best-selling writer, and non-fiction for an international criminal. Amongst other top-secret briefs.

Bio-wise: I run every day, go canoeing and am an art-history nut. I’ve got parents, feelings and kids.

I write a Substack on film, literature and creativity – As Best I Can – borrowed from the personal motto of the fifteenth-century Flemish master Jan van Eyck.