Ethan Hemmati

OCLW’s Global Majority and Underrepresented Writers’ Programme is a highly competitive initiative offering eight scholarships to life-writers whose voices have historically been marginalised in publishing and academia. Alongside dedicated seminars and lectures, scholars receive skills training, mentorship, and community support. The Programme aims to ensure that the future of life-writing more fully reflects the broad and diverse range of voices that surround us.

Agents and publishers are warmly encouraged to contact scholars directly.

Ethan Hemmati is a Scottish-Iranian PhD candidate. He is particularly interested in life-writing as a genre that fluidly traverses autobiography, autofiction, the bildungsroman, confession, and other literary forms. He is drawn to life-writing for its capacity to inhabit multiple narrative registers at once, offering rich terrain for both critical and creative engagement. Recent texts that have informed his thinking include Some Men in London by Peter Parker and Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.

Project Details:

Ethan’s project explores the intertextual lives of three postwar American authors with documented histories of adultery. He examines how infidelity is represented across their biographies, life-writing, and fictional works, considering the ways in which personal transgression is refracted through literary form. Ethan hopes to use his time at OCLW to develop his project for publication as an academic monograph.