Patricia Canning is an experienced linguist, researcher, and creative reading & writing teacher who founded read.live.learn. as a very practical way of using language and literary fiction to address real, everyday issues.

A committed reader since she was old enough to hold a book, Patricia dreamed of working in a library until she was dissuaded by the challenge of observing the obligatory silence. Instead, she studied and went on to teach literature and linguistics at Queen's University, Belfast, before ditching the hills for the flat ground of the Netherlands.

Driven by a desire to make books accessible to everyone, Patricia spent three years with Liverpool-based charity, The Reader Organisation, where she established read-aloud groups in diverse and often challenging environments (for example, prisons, mental health hospitals, schools, universities, and workplaces). read.live.learn continues and extends this work, offering intensive workshops and presentations on using creative reading and focused writing as engaging and inclusive ways of developing personally, socially, and professionally. 

Patricia is a university lecturer with a varied teaching and research portfolio that includes forensic linguistics and discourse analysis, rhetoric, stylistics, creative writing, and academic writing & presenting. She has spoken at many conferences, hosted a range of workshops, and given seminars and lectures across Ireland, the UK, New York, and the Netherlands. She is a member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association, The International Association of Forensic Linguistics, the Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics, and the Society of English-Language Professionals in the Netherlands.

She also thinks she looks cool with her sunglasses on.