Summer News 2024

It's been a busy Summer, with lots of good news building up since our last News post (which you can read here). So it feels like a good time to share some of the great things students and staff have been doing in the Centre for New Writing at Leicester. 

Creative Writing News, August 2024

Firstly, congratulations to all the final-year BA students who took Creative Writing either at programme or modular level, and who graduated this July! Many of the current MA Creative Writing students and MA Modern and Contemporary Literature and Creative Writing students are now approaching the end of their course, so good luck to them as they complete their dissertations.

Congratulations to second-year English with Creative Writing student Grace Klemperer, who won both this year's John Coleman Prize (for best undergraduate non-poetry submission) and G. S. Fraser Prize (for best undergraduate poetry submission). And congratulations too to Shauna Strathmann and Sara Waheed, who received Honourable Mentions in the G. S. Fraser Prize. 

In early May, we published all five of the winning of entries of the "Nature, the Environment and Sustainability Competition," which the Centre for New Writing ran earlier this year in conjunction with the Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability, and was judged by celebrated author Mark Cocker. You can now read the winning stories on Creative Writing at Leicester by Carol Rowntree Jones, Sam Dawson, Alice Newitt, Lee Wright, and Sophie Sparham.

Congratulations to Laura Besley and Tina Jay, both of whom have been awarded Midlands4Cities AHRC Funding to undertake PhDs in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Congratulations to Maisie Ridgway, who has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Trust Fellowship for post-doctoral research in Creative Writing. 

Everybody's Reviewing, our book review sister site, has now had well over 400,000 readers. Congratulations and thanks to all concerned: our reviewers, interviewers, interviewees, editors and readers. Creative Writing at Leicester has had over 250,000 readers. Again, thanks to all our contributors, editors and readers. 

Student and Staff News, August 2024

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing graduate Jess Bacon, whose moving article about her father's illness was recently published in The Metro here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Joe Bedford has reviewed Hope Never Knew Horizon by Douglas Bruton for Everybody's Reviewing here, and The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo here. 

Congratulations to Laura Besley, MA Creative Writing graduate, whose story "The Pros and Cons of Conditioning" is published by Northern Gravy here. Laura's story "Oh, So Brightly" was shortlisted for the A4 Scratch Books Competition. You can read it here. 

Congratulations to Constantine, MA Creative Writing graduate, whose new novel Alien Boy was recently published. You can read more about the novel, and an excerpt from it, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Constantine has also reviewed Legion of Lost Letters by Debasish Lahiri for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

MA Creative Writing graduate Lauren Foster has reviewed A Marginal Sea by Zoë Skoulding for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing graduate Tracey Foster, whose haiku was longlisted for the Haiku Foundation's "Magnificent Trees" Competition. You can read her entry here. Tracey also had three poems featured in Rhythm Zine, which was on exhibition in the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in late May. Tracey has written a review of All Sorts of Lives by Claire Harman for Everybody's Reviewing here, a review of Wanderers by Kerri Andrews here, a review of Unravel Exhibition at the Barbican here, a review of Shadowlands by Matthew Green here, and a review of The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd here. 

Beth Gaylard, PhD Creative Writing student, has written a review of God's Country by Kerry Hadley-Pryce for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

The Granite Kingdom by PhD Creative Writing graduate Tim Hannigan has now been published as a paperback. You can read more about this brilliant book on the publisher's website here. Tim's essay, "The Machinery of a Hare," was also recently published on The Clearing by Little Toller Books here. 

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing graduate Millie Henson, whose second play, Where You Go, was staged in the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. You can see more details here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Kathy Hoyle has had her story "Dreki" published by Roi Fainéant Literary Press. You can read it here. Her story "Gallows Pole" is in New Flash Fiction Review here. As part of Writer's HQ "Writing as Resistance Festival," she will be running a workshop on "Discovering Dialect" on Monday 16 September at 7pm. You can see details and book here. In Autumn, Kathy will be interviewed by Jen Bowden for her Northern Voices podcast, which you can find here. 

Congratulations to Felicity James, Associate Professor at the University of Leicester, whose story "Llewellyn, Last King of Wales: his role in the divorce" won first prize in the Westword Micro Fiction Competition! You can read it here.  

Sabyn Javeri, PhD Creative Writing graduate, has been invited to be one of this year's Writers in Residence for the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP). The IWP is the "oldest and largest multinational writing residency in the world." You can read about the residency and Sabyn's work here. 

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing graduate Tionee Joseph whose work was featured at the International Working Class Story Festival, at Upstairs at the Western and online. 

Karen Powell-Curtis, PhD Creative Writing graduate, has had her poem "Mary Wilson" published in Allegro Poetry Magazine here. 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Cathi Rae, who has recently published two new poetry pamphlets, Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems and Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems. You can read more about them on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing graduate Sally Shaw, whose story "A Blackbird, Bobble Hat and an Answer" has been published by Roi Fainéant Literary Press here. Sally Shaw has also written a review of Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay by Jeff Young for Everybody's Reviewing here, and a review of The Dark Within Them by Isabelle Kenyon here. 

In June, Jane Simmons, PhD Creative Writing student, gave a poetry reading at an online event with Imtiaz Dharker (who has previously been featured on this site here) run by the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. Jane has also reviewed The Strongbox by Sasha Dugdale for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Megan Stafford-Adatia, BA English with Creative Writing student, has written a review of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Associate Professor Jonathan Taylor's new memoir, A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons, will be published by Goldsmiths Press in September. You can read more about it on the publisher's website here. 

Rory Waterman, who gained his PhD at the University of Leicester and is now Associate Professor at Nottingham Trent University, has published his fourth poetry collection with Carcanet, Come Here to this Gate. You can read about it on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Harry Whitehead, Associate Professor at the University of Leicester, has written a review of Merchant by Alexandra Grunberg for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Lee Wright, PhD Creative Writing student, has written a review of Our Island Stories by Corinne Fowler, Professor at the University of Leicester, for Everybody's Reviewing here. He has also reviewed The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

rob mclennan, "On Beauty: stories"

 

Born in Ottawa (Canada’s glorious capital city) and raised on a farm near Maxville, Ontario, rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. With recent titles including World’s End (ARP Books, 2023), essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) is his fourth work of fiction, after the novels white (The Mercury Press, 2007) and Missing Persons (The Mercury Press, 2009), and The Uncertainty Principle: stories (Chaudiere Books, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], and co-founded the ottawa small press book fair in fall 1994, which he’s run twice a year on his own since. He is the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and he regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices on his blog here. 

About On Beauty: stories, by rob mclennan
The thirty-two stories in On Beauty exist as lyrically dense bursts of short prose that move across wide swaths of narrative in compact spaces, offering explorations of characters working through small or large moments. The stories include parenting, pregnancy, the death of a parent, complications between friends, spouses, etcetera. These stories, in their own ways, explore moments as potential sequence, and how each of those moments might impact each other. To ask where, when, how or who: the “why” is the story; all else are facts.

You can read an excerpt from On Beauty below. You can read more about the book on the publisher's website here. 

On beauty
Upon the death of her widower father, there came the matter of dismantling his possessions. Emptying and cleaning the house for resale. It wasn’t as though either of the children were planning on returning to the homestead, both some twenty years removed, but it fell to them to pick apart the entirety of their parents’ lives from out of this multi-level wooden frame, a structure originally erected by their grandfather and great-grandfather immediately following the Great War. Theirs was the first house in the area, constructed on seventy-five acres of farmland, long since disappeared to development. Across the street, a smaller house of similar design and build, where the hired man and his family had lived. Where, originally, their widowed great-grandmother spent her final days, sixteen long years past the death of her husband.

The house was a local oddity, an obvious construction decades before the brown brick and stone-grey on either side, and contemporary infills. Where the neighbouring bungalow was once their back garden; another, where livestock spent fallow days. Where most likely a barn stood, then a shed, which now hold driveway and garage. Foundation maintenance that routinely uncovers the roots of an orchard. The difficulty of inground pools, and the puncture of linings.

Their father’s house: now that he was dead, it was though it had died as well. They had no choice but to bury it. Not a word. Silence. My wife and her sister, dismantling what would never exist again, and by dismantling, removing it from all but their memory. This, too, will fade.

Sarah Holland-Batt, "The Jaguar: Selected Poems"

 

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning Australian poet, editor and critic. Born in Southport, Queensland in 1982, she grew up in Australia and the United States, and has also lived in Italy and Japan. She holds a first-class Honours degree in Literature, an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Queensland, and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was the W. G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholar for 2010-2011. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, an Asialink Literature Residency, a Château de Lavigny Fellowship, a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, and the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B. R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

Her first book, Aria, was the recipient of several literary prizes, including the Anne Elder Award, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize and the Thomas Shapcott Prize, was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards, and was commended for The Age's Poetry Book of the Year. Her second book, The Hazards, won the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Prize, and the John Bray Memorial Poetry Award. Her third book, The Jaguar, won the 2023 Stella Prize, the Queensland Premier’s Award for State Significance, and the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, and was named The Australian newspaper’s 2022 Book of the Year. The Jaguar was also longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the ALS Gold Medal, and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize.

About The Jaguar: Selected Poems
With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batt’s books of poetry up to her stellar prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia’s best-known and widely read poets to many readers for the first time.

Marked by her distinctive lyric intensity, metaphorical dexterity and linguistic mastery, Holland-Batt’s cosmopolitan poems engage with questions of loss and extinction, violence and erasure. From haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua to the devastations and transfigurations of her father’s long illness, Holland-Batt fearlessly probes the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, and our human place within the natural order of things. Her portrayal of a much-loved father trying to cope with Parkinson’s Disease touched the hearts of many in Australia who would never usually read a book of poetry.

Her poetry is charged with a fierce intelligence, and an insistence on seeing the world with exacting clarity—as well as a startling capacity to transform our understandings of the familiar through the imaginative act. The poet’s piercing gaze is also frequently turned inward, offering a dissection of the self that is by turns playful and sharply ironic.

The Jaguar: Selected Poems brings together the finest work from her debut volume Aria (2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies of memory; the searching external and internal landscapes of The Hazards (2015); and the fierce, unflinching elegies of The Jaguar (2022), which challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. 

You can read more about The Jaguar: Selected Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Jaguar: Selected Poems, by Sarah Holland-Batt

Empires of Mind

Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks,
in the gardens, under a shade sail, 
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.
Midway through a lunch of cremated schnitzel
spoon-fed by the carer with the port-wine stain
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.

In the night he cries out for Winston Churchill.
During his morning bath he cries for Winston Churchill.
When the nurse does up his buttons he will not stop his weeping. 
When the therapist wheels him to Tuesday piano
my father ignores the Mozart and cries for Winston Churchill.

He cries not like a child seeking absolution, 
not like the mourner or the mourned, but free and unconstrained
as one who has spent a long time denying an urge
and is suddenly giddy and incontinent in his liberation.

The cleaners are unmoved. The woman 
who brings his hourly cup of pills is bright as a firework 
and goes about her round with the hardness 
of one who has heard all the crying in the world 
and finds in that reservoir nothing more disturbing
than a tap’s dripping drumbeat in a sink. 

But the night supervisor is frightened 
in the early hours when the halls ping 
with the sharp beep of motion sensors and my father’s crying. 
His longing for silence is fierce and keen
as a pregnant woman’s craving for salt and fried chicken, 
as my father’s crying for Winston Churchill. 

And the women in their beds call for it to stop like a Greek chorus
croaking like bullfrogs each to each in the dark—
unsettled, loud, insatiable—the unutterable fear 
rippling through them like a herd of horses 
apprehending the tremor of thunder
on a horizon they cannot see but feel. 

The Gift

In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair

garlanded by summer hibiscus

like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche.

A flowering wreath buzzes around his head—

passionate red. He holds the gift of death

in his lap: small, oblong, wrapped in black.

He has been waiting seventeen years to open it

and is impatient. When I ask how he is

my father cries. His crying comes as a visitation,

the body squeezing tears from his ducts tenderly

as a nurse measuring drops of calamine

from an amber bottle, as a teen at the car wash

wringing a chamois of suds. It is a kind of miracle

to see my father weeping this freely, weeping

for what is owed him. How are you? I ask again

because his answer depends on an instant’s microclimate,

his moods bloom and retreat like an anemone

as the cold currents whirl around him—

crying one minute, sedate the next.

But today my father is disconsolate.

I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again.

I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade.

I hate myself for noticing his poetry—the triplet

that should not be beautiful to my ear

but is. Day, year, decade—scale of awful economy.

I want to give him his present but it is not mine

to give. We sit as if mother and son on Christmas Eve

waiting for midnight to tick over, anticipating

the moment we can open his present together—

first my father holding it up to his ear and shaking it,

then me helping him peel back the paper,

the weight of his death knocking,

and once the box is unwrapped it will be mine,

I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,

every day I will know it opening in me.

Tess Kincaid, "Limestone: Legacy of a Curse"

 

Tess Kincaid is the author of Pechewa: An American Odyssey (2024), and three poetry collections published by Finishing Line Press, Patina (2011), Unpressed (2013), and No Third Thing (2016). She is a Forward Prize nominee. Limestone: Legacy of a Curse (2024) is her second novel.  

About Limestone: Legacy of a Curse, by Tess Kincaid
Limestone: Legacy of a Curse is inspired by true events, including many experienced by the author. In 1810, a powerful Native American curse was bestowed on a plot of land near the banks of the Scioto River, in the recently formed state of Ohio. One hundred thirteen years later, in 1923, a stone and cedar manor house was constructed on the ill-fated land. The deceptively beguiling house, named Limestone by its first owners, lured five generations of occupants, from the days of Prohibition, through World War II and the Vietnam War, to the 1980s Black Monday stock crash, enabling the curse to inflict haunting tragedy upon all who lived within its walls. Limestone: Legacy of a Curse is the prequel to present-day events in Pechewa: An American Odyssey. 

From Limestone: Legacy of a Curse

Tree understood that all houses, especially old houses, spoke their own distinctive language. The unique creak of expanding floorboards, water settling in pipes, and the rattling of radiators is expected, even welcomed. They comprised the personality of a house, and after one got to know it, it became a familiar comfort. It was the same with Limestone. After six months, she knew all the usual thumps and bumps, and what time of day or night they might occur. But there were other sounds, random sounds, unexplained sounds. The turning of a doorknob, a door closing without the pull of an open window, the creak made only by a foot on the sixth and seventh steps of the front stairway, or the metallic squeak made from the turning of a water faucet in the middle of the night.

One night in late autumn, Tree awoke to the sound of footsteps on the front stairs. She was familiar with the various creaks the steps emitted, depending on who was ascending or descending. The light scamper made by children was not the same as the sound of an adult, and a male’s step was heavier than a female’s. This step was female. It gently creaked the sixth and seventh step, followed by a sharp rattle like the sound of a string of pearls dropping to the hardwood floor. Tree sat up in bed, and held her breath, listening. After a long exhale and deep breath, she noticed a heavy scent in the air, heady and intoxicating, like an old-fashioned oriental perfume. It was unlike anything she had ever smelled. She sat in the dark for several minutes inhaling the unusual scent until it slowly faded. The room was cold. The red numbers on the digital alarm clock read 3:20. In the distance, Tree heard the mournful nostalgic train whistle as it passed the Linworth crossing, as it did every night around this time. 

Sophie Duffy, "D is for Death"

Sophie Duffy writes about the complications and joys of family life. As a Gen-Xer, she has a particular fascination with the 70s and 80s. Her debut novel The Generation Game (Legend Press, 2011) won both the Yeovil Literary Prize and the Luke Bitmead Bursary. This Holey Life (2012), Bright Stars (2015) and Betsy and Lilibet (2018) were also published by Legend. She has written romcoms under the pen name Lizzie Lovell for Allen and Unwin and ghost-written a nurse’s memoirs. She is RLF writing fellow at the University of Manchester and also runs the Exeter Novel Prize as part of Creative Writing Matters. D is for Death is her first non-fiction book and was published in July 2024 by Hero. A Devonian, she now lives on the Wirral. 

About D is for Death, by Sophie Duffy
D is for Death is a cultural and personal roadmap of death and dying, covering all aspects from accidents and bodies to contagion and ghosts, each letter unveiling a new facet. The result of dealing with cancer during the time of Covid, D is for Death adds to the growing death positive conversation; by dragging death into the open and facing our mortality head on, we can live life more fully. The book encourages the reader to consider the choices for the disposal of your body, to write your funeral plan, to talk about grief and loss, to explore the significance of terror and war, to reflect on the impact of climate change, to ponder the mysteries that defy explanation. Full of stories, information and memoir, D is for Death embraces the one certainty that binds us all – the journey from A-Z.

You can read more about D is for Death on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From D is for Death

We are in the NAAFI canteen of Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker beneath the green fields of Cheshire. Initially, a bombing decoy site for Crewe railway station, in 1941, it became RAF Hack Green, defending the land between Birmingham and Liverpool. Following WW2, it was converted to a Cold War bunker; in the event of a nuclear attack, Hack Green would be responsible for the territory stretching from Cheshire to Cumbria. No longer secret, the bunker is now open to the public. We have just watched a film loop playing the public information film Protect and Survive, told in the reassuring voice of Patrick Allen how to deal with dead family members: wrap in polythene, tag, bury. 

I am with my partner, Neil, and his twelve-year-old daughter, Ella, eating  ‘wartime tomato soup and bread,’ drinking tea from tin cups. Ella is used to visiting odd places with her stepmother. (Thankfully, she is a stoic child). Neil, who grew up on the Wirral, says they were told at school not to worry, because the second the bomb hit the chemical plants of Runcorn, they’d be eviscerated. I think about my home in Devon. Probably a hideous slow death. I remember the existential threat of annihilation which hung over the childhoods and teenage years of Gen-Xers, seeping into pop culture. ‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Murakami’s film of Raymond Briggs’s Where the Wind Blows. (Not exactly The Snowman). Now, underground, whilst tucking into carrot cake, Ella recounts how her friend is anxious about a nuclear attack with Putin pushing the button. She is dismissive. I wish I had her presence of mind. Why fret about tomorrow? 

Before we leave, we browse the souvenirs. She chooses a magnet. On the journey home, in the back of the car, Ella holds it like a talisman. As we head onto the Wirral, chemical plants in view, she asks: would my magnet survive a nuclear blast? We swap a look, her dad and me. What should we say? Ella answers her own question. ‘No point worrying. We’ll all be dead.’