We are delighted that MSt alumna Theresa Lola has been awarded the Walcott Prize. Honoring the work of St. Lucian Nobel Prize poet Derek Walcott, the prize is offered annually for a book of poetry by a non-US citizen published anywhere in the world. This year’s prize was judged by Ishion Hutchinson.
Theresa’s collection is available to buy here.
A beautiful reflection by Departmental Lecturer Kate Longworth on her relationship with reading
I didn’t realise until I sat down to write this how consuming, even dysfunctional, a relationship I have with reading and with books. I think about reading possibly more than anything else. Even eating. I currently have a bag of books in the boot of my car, waiting for my husband to be out of the house so that I can sneak them in unnoticed.
When I’m thinking about reading I’m thinking about books that I have and books that I want, but I’m also weighed down by how many books there are still to read. I’m dividing books into shifting categories in my mind which only partly mirror the piles that exist around the house. There are a few piles in my office, at least one for each current academic and/or creative project I have on the go, and others for books that made it from the boot to the office and which I haven’t shelved yet. I move these books around a lot—not necessarily as a function of having read them, often just as a way of sorting out how I feel about a project or just life in general. There is a pile on the landing, books from past lives that I can’t bring myself to part with, but which somehow don’t belong in my office. Then there are two piles on my bedside table, fiction and non-fiction. Just before bed is when I read for ‘fun’. I carry guilt in relation to reading for fun, though, as there’s so much still to learn, so I also have an e-reader, which contains its own virtual piles of the crime novels I read to try to forget about the piles of books that surround me.
Starting with crime, then, I think Mick Herron’s new Slow Horses novel contains his best writing to date. The textually sonic precision of Herron’s prose style can’t, in my opinion, be rendered on screen, so however good the TV show is, I’d suggest not missing the books. I’m planning a research article on Agatha Christie, and hers are making regular trips between the bedside table and two teetering piles in the office. I’m planning to focus in the first instance on representations of adoption and the care system in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Ordeal by Innocence and The Mousetrap. I think she’s severely underrated as a prose stylist.
I tend to read contemporary fiction on the e-reader, but sometimes books feel so important to me that I end up buying them in hard copy too. Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain have made that transition in the last month or so (from the personal I find myself dwelling a lot on what Stuart does to foreground a regional and working-class cadence). I’m also working my way back through Elizabeth Bowen, currently The Last September.
When I recently saw my own work categorised as ‘intellectual history’ I felt mingled overwhelm and laugh-out-loud-and-pinch-yourself gratitude. Richard Rorty wrote a brilliant essay prizing this field as ‘the story of the people who made splendid but largely unsuccessful attempts to ask the questions we ought to be asking.’ There have been five books in the past year or so which have made me want to run around holding them aloft and pressing them on people. Our Creative Writing MSt students know my feelings about Questlove’s historiographically magnificent Hip Hop Is History—it’s difficult to think of a good reason not to read it. One of my cats is named after Charles Taylor, whose recent Cosmic Connections is the second part of his joyfully surprising narrative of what humans try to do with language. As with Taylor, everything Simon Critchley writes makes me feel like I’m being warmly welcomed into dialogue with some of the greatest minds in history, and I’m happy to exercise a cliché in insisting that his recent book on Tragedy is a must-read. I was a few years late to Peter E Gordon’s Continental Divide, the story of a public conversation between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos, but now everything he writes is on pre-order. And I don’t know how Bill Mander manages to make the narrative-arc-defying variance present within the story of British Idealism so unputdownable. Incidentally, he offers a rare degree of insight into the wonderful TH Green, an important figure in the history of Oxford’s Lifelong Learning department (and the namesake of another of my cats).
Poetry is always close by – Raymond Antrobus’s recent book is to hand, as well as the TS Eliot prize-nominated collection from course alum Isabelle Baafi. I’ll finish with something from a regularly revisited poet, Edna St Vincent Millay, which sums up my relationship with my fortress of books:
Siege
This I do, being mad:
Gather baubles about me,
Sit in a circle of toys, and all the time
Death beating the door in.
White jade and an orange pitcher,
Hindu idol, Chinese god,—
Maybe next year, when I’m richer—
Carved beads and a lotus pod…
And all this time
Death beating the door in.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Oxford Creative Writing MSt, we are proud to announce the publication of Meridian. A collection of poetry, prose and dramatic writing from twenty-five acclaimed alumni of the programme, curated by Amal Chatterjee, Mary Jean Chan and Barney Norris, the book includes an introduction by founding Course Director Clare Morgan, and a foreword by George Szirtes, recent recipient of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry. You can buy your copy here.
Departmental Lecturer Barney Norris’s latest play Going Out Out opens this week at HOME Manchester, in a co-production between HOME and Karl Sydow, prior to a London transfer in spring 2026. You can book tickets here. The playtext is also available from Faber.
Ian’s gone out less since he became a widower. Actually, he hasn’t gone out at all – a local charity gets his shopping and he only leaves the house to water the garden. But when Raz drops Ian’s groceries round one day and finds him wearing his late wife’s dress, because it helps him feel closer to her and because he likes to wear something loose fitting on hot days, an unlikely friendship starts that changes everything. Soon, Ian finds himself back in the working men’s club run by his estranged daughter, Lauren, preparing to give the performance of his life…
Going Out Out is a show filled with music, courage and love about a man who finds a way to cope with grief by joining the Manchester drag scene. With soulful sounds and infectious pop anthems, the show’s musical soundtrack has something to move everyone.
Prisoners of Empire: How Former Colonies Were Set Up to Fail
Amal Chatterjee
“A compelling social and political balance-sheet of empire, revealing how former colonies worldwide are still shackled by the legacies of colonial oppression.
Why do some former colonies fail, staggering from crisis to crisis, while others recover? Why did so many succumb to dictatorship, corruption, civil war and instability after independence?
Amal Chatterjee argues that these ‘failures’ are underpinned by persistent, robust colonial structures which preserve and reproduce the oppressive, exploitative systems of the past….”
https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/prisoners-of-empire/
We are delighted that former student Chris Barkley has published his debut novel The Man on the Endless Stair, described in the Times as ‘an eerie, deeply atmospheric tale of hidden treasure and trauma.’ A tense and atmospheric Scottish island murder mystery, the book is available from Birlinn and in all good bookshops!
Congratulations to our former student Isabelle Baafi, whose debut collection Chaotic Good, already shortlisted for the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection, has now been shortlisted for the prestigious T.S.Eliot Prize as well.
Departmental Lecturer Barney Norris shares some of his current reading and research focuses.
I read a couple of hundred books a year; in the last week, Michael Kaiser’s The Art of the Turnaround, a memoir that’s also a how-to guide for revitalising struggling arts organisations, has inspired me; Damian Hannan’s Rural Exodus and Michael McCarthy’s Like A Tree Cut Back were interesting bedfellows; Albert Murray’s The Hero and the Blues allowed me to spend more time thinking about a favourite preoccupation of mine, the social function and meaning of the storyteller; Alberto Manguel’s Packing My Library, a kind of minor-key sequel to his larger, more optimistic but, dare I say it, slightly less interesting because overextended The Library at Night, allowed me to think about late style and the ways writers change as they go through life, and of course about libraries (I have a growing library about libraries, another favourite preoccupation); and Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records was like snap crackle and pop for my head, offering up an original, provocative model for narrative structure that I sometimes loved, sometimes wanted to argue with, sometimes felt estranged by, but always wanted to keep reading.
Today, I’m spending time with Julie Brominicks’ The Edge of Cymru. This book is several cuts above the average ‘I walked round X landscape for Y amount of time’ travelogue – a genre that flooded the bookshops in the wake of the success of Robert Macfarlane, and might have done more good for nature if many of its products had remained as unfelled trees. But Seren, who published this book and (full disclosure) have published two of my own, have unearthed a real gem here. I have been deeply moved by Brominicks’ writing – its specificity and humanity about love, belonging, language and home, and also her deep insight into the history of her subject. I’ve been able to situate my own family’s forced departure from Wales a century ago in a larger context thanks to her. It makes me all the more convinced that Welsh culture needs to make more room for the exiled Welsh diaspora in its discourse – the wave of emigration that followed the Great War, prompted by the collapse of the Welsh economy at that time, bears comparison with the equivalent Irish emigration, and that legacy is not one I read enough about.
Current Projects/Research
I don’t talk specifics about my work until it’s been announced for production or publication, but there are projects on the horizon in the public domain, so I will happily talk about them till the cows come home. Firstly there’s a new play called Going Out Out, premiering at HOME in Manchester this autumn. HOME invited me to write about drag in northern working men’s clubs in the 1970s back in 2021, and I accepted their invitation with delight and amazement. We were just beginning to emerge from an acutely identitarian moment in the theatre, a kind of right-wing Balkanism that swept the trade for a period, so for me – a southern, middle class, heterosexual, cis gender man born in the 1980s – to be invited to write a play set in this cultural context was surprising and inspiring. Of course, the only valid defence for the identitarianism of the late 2010s in the theatre was that people like me got far too much of the available work, and there was a need to rebalance a horribly uneven playing field, and I didn’t want to be working against the grain of that rebalancing, so I did question the invitation at first – but I was reassured that, having welcomed many artists from within the communities in question onto their stages to dramatise this and other similar cultural contexts, HOME now felt it would be interesting to bring in an outsider next and see the results of that cross-pollination. My work, therefore, would sit alongside a range of other stories written by a diverse group of artists. Which is what any good writer wants to hear, I think. The play I wrote, Going Out Out, is a story of a man recovering from grief who is lifted up and, in a way, forgiven by a community that welcomes and accepts him for who he is.
Manchester is one of thirteen cities on three continents where my work is presently scheduled to appear in the next twelve months. Much of the travelling will be done by Sting’s The Last Ship, for which I’ve written a new book, as this extraordinary masterpiece finally reaches its climactic form. More than a decade after its premiere, The Last Ship has already been recognised as the greatest British musical written in my lifetime. But I actually think it’s the most significant musical work to emerge from these islands since Britten premiered Peter Grimes, and my work on the show has been dedicated to helping to establish that reputation for the work among the general public. It’s surreal and wonderful to have had the chance to work closely with Sting on a project he recognises as his greatest achievement. As a kid, I learned all the words to his songs, and listened to them more than almost any other music; I used to daydream about being a backing singer in The Police. In my own way, with my own skillset, I feel like I’ve found a way to achieve that dream. The show is opening in Amsterdam and Paris next January and February, with further dates and venues to be announced.
Finally, I have also begun a small project I’d love to direct readers towards. In February this year I moved to a cottage in Hampshire, a return to the rural environment where my life began, but which, of necessity, I had to leave behind for a time in order to fight my way into the theatre. As a method of reconnecting to the rural, I began making a list of every bird I saw each day in a little blue notebook I carried around with me. After three months, I knew the birds living in my garden so well that this act became unnecessary, and I began to expand my focus. It was writing as rooting, really, writing as settling in. The latest result of that has been a series of terza rima sonnets I’ve been writing about where I live, which I’ve been uploading to a Substack on Sundays. Last week I saw my friend the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, with whom I worked on adapting his novel The Remains of the Day for the stage back in 2019, and he asked me why I was doing this; I found I didn’t quite have a decent answer, and have been thinking about it since. I’ve come to realise they are a development of the birdwatching I’d done earlier this year, a process of homemaking; and, of course, a puzzle I’m happy getting lost in, preoccupied by what Yeats called ‘the fascination of what’s difficult’. If you have time, I’d love you to read them.
The MSt team are delighted to celebrate the publication of Alexandra Strnad’s The Wykehamist, in a really beautiful edition with a cover design referencing classic crime novels of the mid-twentieth century. You can order the novel direct from the publisher here.
We are delighted to learn that MSt tutor Ingrid Persaud has been nominated for the RSL Encore Award for her novel The Lost Love Songs Of Boysie Singh. Awarded to an exceptional second novel, past winners of the Encore include Sally Rooney, Ali Smith and Anne Enright – it’s a fantastic predictor of literary careers, and a major achievement to be nominated.
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