Jason Hewitt Bennett – Bath Spa University

Personal statement

Jason Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Publishing at Bath Spa University. He is Course Leader for BA Journalism and Publishing Single Honours and MA Children's Publishing. He teaches on a number of modules including JPU4000 Introduction to Journalism, PUB4002 Create Lab, PUB5002 Marketing and Selling Books, PUB6104 Content Marketing Strategy and PUB7104 Multiplatform Publishing, as well as other modules occasionally across the Journalism & Publishing and MA Children's Publishing courses.

He has over 25 years’ sales and marketing experience, working across a number of professional and academic publishers, including Pearson Education, Taylor & Francis, Kogan Page, and Cengage Learning, where he was Senior Marketing Manager for five years. He has worked with a range of print and digital products including textbooks, journals, digital content and mass-market non-fiction.

He is also a well-established writer across a number of forms. He is the author of two critically acclaimed novels (as Jason Hewitt). "The Dynamite Room" (2014) was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Writing and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. "Devastation Road" (2015) was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. He completed his MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa.

Outside of publishing and journalism he is also a playwright. His first full-length play, "Claustrophobia" premiered at Edinburgh Fringe and had a London run at The Hope Theatre.

As well as teaching at Bath Spa, he also spent six years as a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and five years as an educational workshop leader at the British Library.