McGuinness's production is divided between literary criticism and fiction, memoir and poetry.
Literary criticism and scholarship
McGuinness is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow in French at St Anne's College, Oxford, and was formerly Fellow in French at Jesus College, Oxford and a Junior Fellow at The Queen's College. Before that, he was a lecturer in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, and taught briefly in the English department at the University of Warwick. Among his academic publications there is a study of T. E. Hulme, [4] an English literary critic and poet who was influenced by Bergson and who, in turn, had a strong influence on English modernism. He is the author of a book on the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck and modern theatre, and a book on poetry and radical politics in late 19th C France. He has also translated Stéphane Mallarmé, [5] a major symbolist poet, and edited an anthology in French of symbolist and decadent poetry. [6]
McGuinness edited two volumes of the Argentinian-Welsh poet and novelist Lynette Roberts, who was highly appreciated by T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves. According to McGuinness, Roberts "might fairly be claimed to be our greatest female war poet" whose work "constitutes one of the most imaginative poetic responses to modern war and the home front in the English language." [7]
Poetry, fiction, and memoir
McGuinness published his first poetry collection, The Canals of Mars, in 2004. [8] His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and translated anthologies of British and Irish poetry.
His first novel, The Last Hundred Days (2011) was centred on the end of the Ceaușescus' regime in Romania, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award; a French version was published under the title Les Cent Derniers Jours. [9] It won the Writers' Guild Award for Fiction and the Wales Book of the Year. He won Wales Book of the Year a second time, in 2015, for his memoir Other People's Countries.
His memoir of childhood in the Belgian town of Bouillon, Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory, appeared in 2014 and won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Pen Ackerley Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
His second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves (2019), won the Encore Award for best second novel from the Royal Society of Literature. It is a fictionalised account of the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010, and the subsequent persecution and false accusations against schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies, who was McGuinness's English teacher at school in Bristol in the 1980s.
In 2025, his third book of poems, Blood Feather, was shortlisted for the inaugural PEN/Heaney Prize for poetry, and, with Stephen Romer, he won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation, for The Day's Ration by Gilles Ortlieb.
