Willy Maley

William Timothy "Willy" Maley (born 2 December 1960, in Glasgow, Scotland) is a Scottish literary critic, editor, teacher and writer.

Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow, Fellow of the English Association (FEA), and founder, with Philip Hobsbaum, of Glasgow's Creative Writing programme. He is a prolific author on subjects including early modern English literature from Spenser to Milton, and on modern Scottish and Irish writing.

Willy Maley is the seventh of nine children, and the first in his family to go to University. He was raised in the district of Possilpark, Glasgow. Maley's father, James Maley, was a former Communist Party member and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who borrowed books weekly from Gilmorehill Book Exchange and other sources. 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 left Possilpark Secondary in 1978 and worked for three years, for Strathclyde Regional Council's Roads Department, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and Glasgow City Libraries before gaining through night classes the qualifications to start at the University of Strathclyde in 1981. He went there initially to study librarianship but failed, resigned from the libraries, and continued with his studies in English Literature and Politics. Maley graduated from Strathclyde with First Class Honours with Distinction, winning the Meston Prize for top degree result in academic year.

In October 1985, after a summer working at the British Film Institute in London, Maley went to Jesus College, Cambridge, earning a Ph.D 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. In 1990 Maley also completed a Diploma in Linguistics for the Teaching of English Language and Literature at the University of Strathclyde.

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