Broadcast
It was, in so many ways, a perfect story. Celebrated writer Ian McEwan is awarded a University of Sussex 50th anniversary gold medal by Professor of English Tom Healy, and then confesses he has just pulped 500 copies of his latest novel, Sweet Tooth, because he had, by chance, called one of his characters – also a Sussex English academic – Tom Healy.
Jacqui Bealing, Senior Press Officer
Diary editors at the Guardian and the Daily Mail (19 July) gleefully ran the story. It also made the Daily Telegraph online and sneaked into an Independent on Sunday preview (22 July) of McEwan’s forthcoming book.
In publicity terms it was a win for both the University and McEwan, although the real Tom Healy admits to being a tad miffed over missing out on fame and immortality; the character has subsequently been renamed Tom Haley.
To add just another twist to this tale, McEwan’s Tom Haley is a specialist in Edmund Spenser, mirroring the expertise of Sussex’s Professor Andrew Hadfield. Andrew’s biography of the Elizabethan poet has just received glowing reviews in the Guardian (21 July) and the Times Higher Education (28 June) among others, and he penned a piece for the Sunday Telegraph (15 July).
As they say (though not often by journalists), you couldn’t make it up …
Elsewhere in the media, James Williams gave interviews to BBC Radio Sussex about the Higgs boson discovery (4 July), whether plumbing should be an academic subject (9 July), and the pros and cons of schools going for academy status (11 July).
Professor Mariana Mazzucato was on BBC Two’s ‘Newsnight’ talking about science funding (17 July) and Professor Hugo Critchley and Dr Sarah Garfinkel described their research about connections between the heart and emotions in BBC Four’s ‘Heart Versus Mind: What makes us human?’ (14 July).
Dr James Wilsdon wrote in Nature (11 July) about the government’s new chief scientific adviser, and Dr Gholam Khiabany talked to the Independent (19 July) about the variety of skills now taught on the University’s MA in Multimedia.