Alan Bilton is a British academic and novelist. His debut novel, The Sleepwalker's Ball, was published in May 2009 by the small independent Welsh press Alcemi. As an academic working for the American Studies department of the University of Wales, Swansea, his areas of expertise and interest are 20th-century / Contemporary American Fiction, American Film (especially Silent Cinema), Modernism, Postmodernism and Psychoanalysis (particularly the works and theories of Sigmund Freud)