03 Apr 08

American author JD Ballam has been appointed as the new Director of the Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford.

Dr John Ballam, a formerly Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, is best known for his autobiography The Road to Harmony: An Appalachian Childhood, and his latest books include a novel, The Toymaker, published on 31 March.

John Ballam was the first in his family to go to university or own a passport and he hopes his personal experience might encourage others to take up writing, regardless of their background.

In his autobiography he talks of growing up on the family farm in Maryland where life remained unchanged for generations. Driving tractors from the age of eight, he lived in a community that sometimes survived on a subsistence diet – even to the extent of eating rats. He left school with nothing more than an attendance record and became a video-player salesman.

However, by his mid 20s he had saved enough money to pay for a place at the University of York, UK, where he was awarded a first-class degree in English and later took a doctorate at Bristol University.

Dr Ballam aims to give everyone the chance to ‘find their voice’. One new initiative is Oxford Writing and Training, which will be launched in the autumn. It will focus on widening participation and enabling students from diverse backgrounds to develop their skills in all areas of writing, including, poetry, fiction, non-fiction and theatre.

Dr Ballam said: ‘I was the first in my family to hold a passport or go to university. Whole generations of my own unique community passed through life with very little contact with the outside world. Through my book The Road to Harmony I hope I have given a voice to those generations as well as a record of a way of life that otherwise would have remained hidden.

'There are a great many wonderful and important stories – of individuals and whole communities – which remain untold. I hope my own experiences will encourage anyone who thinks they have such a story in them to have the confidence to put their thoughts and experiences on paper.’

Trevor Phillips OBE, Chair of Equality and Human Rights Commission, is the new patron of Oxford Writing and Training. Sir Trevor said: ‘In a world where effective expression has become vital to participation, the capacity to write well is more than a luxury for middle-class folk.  It is one page of the passport to social mobility. So that in one of the most cultured and literate cities in the world, the benefits of culture and literacy are available to everyone.’

JD Ballam’s book The Road to Harmony: An Appalachian Childhood, published in 2000, was placed alongside Cider with Rose and Angela’s Ashes by author Joanna Trollope, with Dirk Bogarde hailing it as ‘a book to cherish’.

Dr Ballam is already a tutor at the Open University and is now developing further creative writing courses for Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education (OUDCE), including the University’s first online creative writing course, due to launch on 28 April 2008.