Research Background: A raft of publications provides advice to research students and their supervisors about handling the writing factor in the research doctoral submission. These include: The postgraduate research handbook (Wisker 2008); How to write a thesis (Murray 2008); The unwritten rules of PhD research (Rugg and Petre 2009); A handbook for doctoral supervisors (Taylor and Beasley 2005); Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision (Kamler and Thomson 2006); and others. In each of the above, writing is treated as a key activity in producing the thesis, seemingly the most fraught for student and supervisor alike, but none of these books considers the writing of a creative component (such as a novel) in the research degree context. Research Contribution: In the Introduction to this UK-published collection of essays, Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy, Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll say: 'novelist and PhD supervisor Nigel Krauth [considers] how the creation of a novel for 'new-breed, non-traditional doctorates' affects both the process and the product. On the one hand, writers obtain support and encouragement; on the other, they might feel constrained because these benefits, flowing from a bureaucratic structure, can impact on the novelist's freedom to create' (p. xii). Combining knowledge of the professional novelist's practice and the creation of novels in new academic contexts, this work considers the idea of a new genre in writing - the Academic Novel. Research Significance: This book chapter enters a practice and research territory not previously examined, i.e. the novel-writing process outside academia compared with that inside universities today. The work was commissioned from the UK (alongside other academic pieces from the USA, the UK and Australia) and is published in the New Writing Viewpoints series, Multilingual Matters, Bristol.