Bran Nicol is Professor of English Literature at the University of Surrey, where he is Head of the School of English and Languages. He studied for his PhD at the University of Lancaster, writing his thesis on the work of the novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch. He has previously taught at the universities of Chichester and Portsmouth, where he was Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature. His books include The Private Eye (Reaktion, 2013), Postmodern Fiction: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Stalking (Reaktion, 2006), which was translated into Italian, Japanese and Korean, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Palgrave, second edition, 2004), and two edited collections: Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2002) and Crime Culture (Bloomsbury, 2010). His interests include contemporary British, European and American fiction, crime fiction, and film, and he has presented his research in these areas at universities around the world. He is currently completing The Value of Postmodernism for CUP as well as editing the forthcoming collection, The Cambridge Companion to British Postmodern Fiction.