What's New?
Poetry Nomination
Congratulations to Kath Stansfield, (Aber PhD graduate in Creative Writing and currently Lecturer in the department) , who has been long-listed for this year’s Eric Gregory Award for her poetry collection, Playing House. The Eric Gregory Awards, for a collection by poets under the age of 30, were founded in 1960 by the late Dr Eric Gregory for the encouragement of young poets. Eric Craven Gregory, also known as Peter Gregory (1888 –1959) was Chairman of publishers Lund Humphries and benefactor of modern art and artists in Britain - http://www.societyofauthors.org/eric-gregory. (Posted 15 May 2012)
Lecturer Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2012
We are greatly pleased to announce that Tiffany Atkinson has been shortlisted in the Wales Book of the Year Award 2012 for her poetry collection, Catulla et al. Described by the publisher, Bloodaxe: “Catulla et al summons up the sensual and scandalous spirit of the Latin poet Catullus – his lyricism, diatribe and bawdy – by turns wrenching, cynical and outrageous. But whereas the Roman love chronicler is a young man about town, Catulla is a free-thinking female confronting modern mores with both ambivalence and uneasy embarrassment.” Read more about Catulla et al, including reviews.
Awarded by Literature Wales (formerly Academi) - the National Company for the development of literature in Wales - "Wales Book of the Year should be about passion, ambition and talent, and the short-listed authors have it in bucket-loads." (Spencer Jordan). The Wales Book of the Year Award Winners will be announced in the Awards Ceremony at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff on Thursday 12 July 2012. (Posted 11 May 2012)
Devolved Voices - a Major Research Project
The development of Welsh poetry in English since 1997 will be the focus for a major new research project which will pay particular attention to the work of poets who have achieved prominence and recognition since Wales’s devolution vote.
Professor Peter Barry (pictured) has been awarded a £232,042 Leverhulme Research Project Grant to lead the ‘Devolved Voices’ project which begins in September of this year and will run for the three years.
Peter said, “We are delighted to have this exciting opportunity to consider the energy, achievements and challenges of contemporary Welsh poetry in English. We are extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their generous support.”
The project includes plans to produce a wide range of publications. One full-length scholarly volume will place contemporary Welsh poetry in English in its wider British poetic context, whilst another will provide detailed studies of major figures within the field. A book of extended interviews with key poets will provide in-depth engagement with practitioners themselves, and a final book of essays will consider the specific question of poetic production within the context of Wales’s devolutionary journey. It will also launch a video-rich website which will provide an important record of discussions with poets themselves, of poets reading their own work, and of interviews with other notable players on the contemporary English-language poetry scene in Wales. The website is intended to serve not only as a significant archive of material for future scholars but also as an entry-point into the project’s work for readers of poetry in general.
Peter will be joined on the ‘Devolved Voices’ team by the critic and scholar of contemporary English-language poetry in Wales, Dr Matthew Jarvis, and by the poet and former editor of New Welsh Review, Kathryn Gray. A PhD student will be recruited to work on a key aspect of the project.
‘Devolved Voices’ boasts an illustrious Advisory Board which brings together National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, T. S. Eliot prize-winner Professor Philip Gross, poet, novelist and commentator Owen Sheers, noted experts on Welsh writing in English Professor Jane Aaron and Professor Tony Brown, and the current editor of Poetry Wales, Dr Zoë Skoulding.
Damian Walford Davies, Head of Department, welcomed Professor Barry’s success and commented, “This major research grant, which the Department is delighted to have secured, reflects our intellectual commitment to Welsh Writing in English in its local, national and international contexts. The ‘Devolved Voices’ project will deliver a range of seminal publications and platforms that will in turn energise the literary culture it explores.” (Posted 11 April 2012)
Dylan Thomas - Radio 4's Great Lives
Damian Walford Davies, Head of Department, could be heard in last week’s Great Lives on Radio 4. Dylan Thomas was proposed by Welsh poet Owen Sheers in this specially recorded edition at Bristol's More Than Words Listening Festival. Includes Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood. Matthew Parris presents. Listen to the podcast - Dylan Thomas
Terry Hetheringon Young Writers Award 2012
Terry Hetherington, who died in 2007, was a poet, short story writer and Welsh Academi Member. In association with the Dylan Thomas Centre, the Terry Hetherington Writer’s Bursary was established to award a young writer aged 16-23. We are delighted that Grace Gay, an undergraduate student of Creative Writing with us here at Aber, will see two of her pieces, a poem Remember All I gave, and a prose piece, Waves, published in the award anthology. The anthology will be entitled Cheval and will be published in paperback by Parthian Press. Congratulations Grace! (Posted 3 April 2012)
New documents shed controversial light on nation’s best-loved poem: Keats’s ode “To Autumn”
In an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday 23 March , Richard Marggraf Turley spoke to John Humphrys about archival discoveries by researchers here at Aberystwyth University. Their research suggests that lying beneath the autumnal mellowness of one of the nation’s best-loved poems, John Keats’s ode “To Autumn”, is a murkier world of banking crisis, rising prices and striking workers.
The previously unseen documents also suggest that the traditional site of the famous “stubble-plains” in “To Autumn” should be revised. Long believed to describe the picturesque water-meadows lining the River Itchen, Keats’s cornfields are more likely, the researchers argue, to portray the west-facing slopes of St Giles’s Hill, overlooking Winchester from its eastern extremity.
Generations of fans swooning along the "Keats Walk" may have been lead - literally - up the garden path by previous scholarly studies. When Keats arrived in Winchester in summer 1819, he did so in the midst of rising tensions over corn prices and agricultural working conditions. Bankers-turned-landowners were snapping up grain-producing land in Winchester to exploit high bread prices and a glut of labour (due to men returning from the Napoleonic Wars). The slopes of St Giles’s Hill had recently been turned over to corn – and it is these that Keats would have seen when he climbed the popular tourist spot. England’s most famous field now lies under a multi-storey car park.
Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester is published in the current edition of The Review of English Studies. The authors are Dr Jayne Archer and Professor Richard Marggraf Turley of the Department of English and Creative Writing, and Professor Howard Thomas from the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences. See press coverage: Guardian; Daily Telegraph 23 March ; Daily Mail; Oxford University blog. (Posted 23 March 2012)
Successful 2012 Sixth Form Conference
On Monday 19 March 2012 the Department of English & Creative Writing hosted its annual Sixth Form Conference, attended by 80 students from five local schools. The conference aimed to give these young people a sense of the Department’s special environment, its combination of academic and creative culture; and in this, according to a reliable source, it was a great success. After a brief introduction by Professor Damian Walford Davies, the opening speaker was Dr Jayne Archer, whose presentation on King Lear brilliantly conveyed some of the intellectual excitement and challenges of studying English at university. We were then delighted to be able to introduce Owen Sheers (pictured) who gave a fascinating talk on his novel Resistance and on his role in its film adaptation (of which he showed some clips). A whole variety of issues were raised by his talk and the discussion afterwards – to do with the processes and constraints of creative work, both what inspires writing and how it can be achieved – that made the occasion unforgettable. We are immensely grateful to Owen Sheers for his contribution, and we very much wish to maintain links with him in the future. After a brief lunchtime tour of the university campus with student volunteers, our visitors returned for the afternoon session. This, the grand finale of the conference, was a talk by Professor Damian Walford Davies on Blake and the Romantic Imagination, a passionate meditation on the cultural and political significance of that great artist and poet. This was an apt conclusion to a day that had highlighted the creative possibilities and imaginative energy of the Department. Well done to those involved in organizing and delivering such a successful event. (Posted 23 March 2012)
New Welsh Review Internship
We are very pleased to host the New Welsh Review in the department and particularly pleased to be able to tell our own MA students about an excellent opportunity offered by this foremost literary magazine.
The New Welsh Review is seeking an enthusiastic intern to assist with the running of the magazine. The post will be for one day per week for up to 10 weeks starting from April 2012. The successful applicant will take on a variety of tasks each week, offering support to editorial, marketing and administrative staff. NWR is seeking an individual with a genuine interest in publishing who would like to gain valuable experience in the field. To be eligible for this post, you must currently be enrolled on a Creative Writing MA course in the Department of English and Creative Writing.
Closing date: 26 March 2012. To apply, please send your CV with a covering letter to admin@newwelshreview.com (Posted 16 March 2012)
Conference News: Wales Book of the Year Author to speak at Postgrad Conference in April
We will be delighted to welcome Wales Book of the Year Author, Ned Thomas, to our annual Postgraduate Conference, 25-27 April 2012. Ned will be one of the plenary speakers at the conference and will be giving a talk entitled "Traveller from an antique land" which will look at the Welsh people (and other minorities) both as perceived by others and as perceivers of other places. In 2011, Ned’s Welsh language memoir Bydoedd, which records his varied career as a writer, journalist, academic and publisher was named Wales’s Book of the Year. Full details. (Posted 16 March 2012)
Historian and Novelist as Detective: CWWLC Annual Lecture
Thursday 22 March 2012, 6pm, Y Drwm, National Library of Wales.
The Centre for Women's Writing and Literary Culture is delighted to welcome Professor Rebecca Stott, distinguished author and Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, to give this year's Annual Lecture. Professor Stott is is the author of several books on Victorian literature and culture, two books of non-fiction, including a biography of Charles Darwin, and several acclaimed historical novels. Her latest book, Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists will be pubished by Bloomsbury in May. In an open lecture entitled “Historian and Novelist as Detective: the Search for Darwin's Lost Predecessors", Professor Stott will bring together these many strands of scholarship in compelling creative-critical and interdisciplinary enquiry. All welcome. (Posted 14 March 2012)
Locating Revolution: Place, Voice Community, 9 -12 July 2012
A conference jointly hosted by the Wales and the French Revolution Project at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies; the Centre for Romantic Studies, Aberystwyth University; and the Department of English, Swansea University. This multi-disciplinary conference invites papers which engage with local, regional, national, European and transatlantic responses to the Age of Revolutions. Deadlinel for papers, 16 March 2012. Full details. (Posted 14 March 2012)
Congratulations to Lecturer in Creative Writing
Good news about Katherine Stansfield, a graduate of our BA, MA and PhD programmes, and currently holder of a temporary lectureship in the department: the novel she wrote for her PhD is to be published next year by Parthian. Set in a Cornish village at the time of the collapse of the pilchard-fishing industry, the novel is both gripping and literate, and Kath is to be congratulated on her achievement. (Posted 28 February 2012)
Conference News: National Poet of Wales to speak at Postgrad Conference in April
We are delighted to announce that Gillian Clarke will be attending the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing's annual Postgraduate Conference held at the National Library of Wales. 
She will be one of the plenary speakers at the conference and will be giving a reading of her poetry and answering questions about her work and her public role. Gillian was named National Poet of Wales in 2008 and is the President of Ty Newydd, the Welsh Writers Centre, which she co-founded in 1990. In 2010 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and in 2011 she received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of Glamorgan. Her poetry is studied by GCSE and A Level students throughout Britain and has been translated into ten languages. Her recent work includes: A Recipe for Water, and a collection of prose, At the Source. At the conference she will be reading poems from her new collection, Ice, which is to be published in October 2012.
Gillian's plenary address is just one event scheduled as part of the Department of English and Creative Writing's 2012 Postgraduate Conference: "Are We There Yet? Remapping Literary Imagination". Other plenary speakers this year will include Wales Book of the Year 2011 author, Ned Thomas, and the head of Aberystwyth University’s English and Creative Writing department, Professor Damian Walford Davies. Further information 2012 Postgraduate Conference . (Posted 28 February 2012)
Former Student Wins Literary Prize
Congratulations to Kate Hamer, former MA student in Creative Writing, who has been awarded First Prize in the distinguished Rhys Davies Short Story Competition. See Full Story. (Posted 28 February 2012)
PhD Student's Latest Novel features in New Welsh Review
Eliza Granville, pictured, is a PhD student of Creative Writing in the department. Look out for an extract of Eliza's latest novel, Narrenturm, in the latest issue of New Welsh Review, number 95 out on 1 March. For more about Eliza's work see Amazon. (Posted 28 February 2012)
Annual Postgraduate Conference, 25-27 April 2012 
The English and Creative Writing department’s annual postgraduate conference, this year entitled ‘Are We There Yet? Remapping Literary Imagination’, will take place on 25- 27 April 2012 at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.
This three day conference will bring together academics, creative writers and students to discuss the following questions:
Where are we from? Where are we going? How does literature explore the depiction of physical and mental journeys? How do minority experiences and new perspectives function within the evolving landscape of literature? This terrain is constantly shifting as our world continues to transition from localised cultures into a global society. How do we define the boundaries of genre when the borders themselves are in a state of flux? What is the impact of these changes on the production of literature and literary theory? Call for papers and details - see 2012 Postgraduate Conference . (Posted 22 February 2012)
Aberystwyth - Texas Doctoral Exchange
The Department of English and Creative Writing is now inviting applications for the Aberystwyth-Texas doctoral exchange. The exchange is an exciting opportunity for the department’s PhD students to experience a different learning environment by spending a semester in the Department of English, Texas A&M University.
Students will be supervised by a member of the English Department with compatible research interests, have the opportunity to deliver a paper on their own research and to contribute to some undergraduate seminars. The Department at Texas teaches creative writing and literary studies. (See Texas Exchange Information and Texas Exchange Application Form - competition open only to existing Phd students).
Opened in 1876 as Texas' first public institution of higher learning, Texas A&M University is a research-intensive flagship university with 38,000-plus undergraduates and more than 9,000 graduate students studying in over 250 degree programs in 10 colleges. The Department of English at Texas A & M University has played an important role on campus since the University's founding in 1876, when "Languages and Literature" was designated as one of the original four courses of study. Now in its second century, the Department has 90 faculty, 100 graduate students, and 700 undergraduate majors, and is built upon a long tradition of study in literature and language, writing and reading, culture and interpretation. The Department of English maintains a tradition of excellence in research and teaching at all levels. (Posted 22 February 2012)
Undergrad Shortlisted for Young Writers' Award
Congratulations! 2nd Year undergraduate student, Beth Garden, has been shortlisted for the WICKED Young Writers’ Award for her poem The Moon. The WICKED Young Writers' Award recognises excellence in writing, encourages creativity and helps develop writing talent in young people. The main judges for the 2011 award are Michael McCabe, Executive Producer of WICKED, Michael Morpurgo, former Children's Laureate and bestselling author and William Fiennes, author and founder of First Story. (Posted 21 December 2011)
London Festival Fringe Award for Tiffany Atkinson
We are delighted to announce that the LONDON FESTIVAL FRINGE has nominated Tiffany Atkinson for the London Poetry Award 2012. The London Awards for Art and Performance are the country's most expansive awards and recognise artists and performers across many art-forms. Nominated artists are considered to have made an outstanding contribution to their art. The shortlist will be announced in late Spring 2012 and awards will take place in central London in the summer of 2012. Well done, Tiffany! (Posted 21 December 2011)
Leverhulme Award: “Women’s Poetry 1400-1800 in English, Irish, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Welsh”
Dr Sarah Prescott, as Principal Applicant, will be directing this fascinating new project for which an important Leverhulme Project Grant has been awarded. Over the next three years she will be working with fellow scholars at the University of Edinburgh, National University of Ireland, Galway and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth.
Commenting on the project Dr Prescott said: "The proposed research will provide a major new literary history of women's poetry in Ireland, Scotland and Wales from 1400 to 1800 in Welsh, Gaelic, Scots, Scots Gaelic and English through a fully edited anthology with translations and a critical study jointly written by the specialists engaged on the project. The last twenty years has seen an explosion of interest in pre-1800 British women's writing. However, there is currently still no comparative study of women’s poetry across linguistic and national boundaries in this period. This is due primarily to thedifficulty of finding a single scholar with the appropriate linguistic expertise and interest across the Anglophone, Irish, Scottish and Welsh contexts of women’s writing, but also a result of the disciplinary division between the study of Celtic and Anglophone cultures. The primary aim of this project is thus to cross these linguistic and disciplinary boundaries to understand for the first time the ways in which women’s poetic production operated and survived in multiple geographical locations and comparative linguistic and cultural contexts. By engaging in the archival recovery of women poets, the over-arching aim of the project is to provide a revisionary account of women’s literary activity which seeks to overturn the critical commonplaces of early women’s writing." (Posted 13 December 2011)
MA Student Wins Faculty Prize
We are delighted to learn that Lowri Emlyn, student of Creative Writing has just been awarded the University Faculty of Arts Prize. (Posted 13 December 2011)
Critical Acclaim for New Poetry Collection
Congratulations to Tiffany Atkinson. Tiffany's second collection Catulla et al was given the lead poetry review in Saturday's Guardian, 20 November. Beginning by describing the book as a 'smart, sardonic and vulnerable updating of Catullus', Patrick McGuinness goes on to say that 'Atkinson's versions are in the finest tradition of creative adaptation: keeping the originals as ballast, but unafraid to sail off on their own tangents.' Atkinson's first collection, Kink and Particle, appeared in 2006; this, her second, has her familiar quickness of mind, her spiky, often self-lacerating wit, and her snappy, vibrant diction. Catulla's is a world of decadent excess and morning-after desolation, of hangovers of the moral as well as the physical kind; of reality TV, suburban infidelity, jealousy and besottedness. – Patrick McGuinness. The collection is published by Bloodaxe Books. (Posted 21 November 2011)
BOOK LAUNCH - Thursday
Honno Press invites you to the launch of Mysterious Death of Miss Austen – a new book by popular local writer, Lindsay Ashford: Thursday 24 November, 18.00 in the Aberystwyth Arts Centre Bookshop. For more about Lindsay's book:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/14/jane-austen-arsenic-poisoning
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/250025/20111115/did-jane-austen-die-arsenic-poisoning-lindsay.htm
(Posted 22 November 2011)
Chawton House Lecture
Dr Sarah Prescott will be presenting a lecture at the Chawton House Library, Alton, Hampshire - "Home of Early English Women's Writing" - on 6 December. Sarah will explore a range of Anglophone Welsh women writers from the eighteenth century in this unique lecture - the last in the Library's series for 2011. See poster (Posted 22 November 2011)
NEW DEGREE SCHEME: BA English and World Literatures
The Department of English and Creative Writing is very pleased to announce the launch of a new degree scheme: BA English and World Literatures, to start next academic year 2012-13. Students taking this dynamic new degree will complete their studies with a truly global perspective on literary studies in English. The English and World Literatures (EWL) degree allows students to explore the work of leading international writers from Africa, Asia, Australasia, the Caribbean and North America, as well the most urgent literary voices from the British and Irish archipelago. EWL offers an exciting combination of 'traditional' English degree and a course of study that reveals the diversity of English-language writing emerging from global locations of culture. (Posted 18 October 2011)
Poetry Competition
Julia Roberts’ poem, ‘A boxed set of seagulls’, was a runner up in the 2011 Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition judged by poet and editor, Professor Jo Shapcott of Royal Holloway College. The poem is published in the October edition of Mslexia, the magazine for women who write.
Julia, who is now a PhD student in the department, worked on the poem as part of her MA here at Aber. Jo Shapcott said, 'Julia Roberts’ poem, ‘A boxed set of seagulls’, was only two small stanzas of eight lines each, capturing the resonance of the holiday gift and the difficulty of choosing the right one. Like Crusoe’s knife in the Bishop poem, they ‘reek of meaning’, but can’t touch the real experience sketched beautifully in the last four lines.' (Posted 12 October 2011)
Another success for PhD Student
Creative writing PhD student Tyler Keevil has been shortlisted for The Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize 2011 for his debut novel Fireball (Parthian Books). This award, open to novels which were eligible for the Booker Prize but not shortlisted for it, is voted for by visitors to the Guardian website. The six shortlisted books will be reviewed on the site and readers will debate their merits before a final vote in October. It’s the second success for Fireball recently, following its longlisting for the Wales Book of the Year Award (see below). Tyler is currently working on a second novel as part of his PhD. (Posted 19 August 2011)