Welcome to Oxford University’s MSt in Creative Writing blog, a resource for Oxford events, calls for submission, competitions, news, interviews and more.
On 31 March at 6pm, MSt Course Director Dr Clare Morgan will be in conversation with fellow writer Susan Sellers, discussing how and why the radically experimental and pioneering writers Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield continue to inspire contemporary writing. They’ll be relating their discussion to their own recently published works of fiction, Scar Tissue and Firebird: a Bloomsbury Love Story.
Further information about this and other events taking place as part of the Oxford Literary Festival can be found here.
MSt Course Director Dr Clare Morgan will discuss her writing with fellow short fiction writer Tim Pears, at Waterstones in Oxford on Thursday 2nd March.
For more information and to book a ticket click here.
Dr Clare Morgan, Director of the MSt in Creative Writing, will be giving a seminar on ‘Writing the Short Story’ at the Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing on Thursday 24th November.
The session will take place in the Mawby Room at 5.00pm (refreshments) for a 5.30pm start. All are welcome and there is no need to book.
Dr Morgan’s stories have been widely anthologized and commissioned by BBC Radio 4, and her new collection, Scar Tissue was published by Seren in September 2022.
‘The Claim,’ from Jane Draycott’s recently published fifth collection, The Kingdom, has been selected by Carol Rumen’s as Poem of the Week in The Guardian.
Also in The Guardian, David Morley wrote that Jane’s work demonstrates, “a patient intelligence of practice, and concision of address, not only in every poem … but in the very philosophy of perception informing her poetics.” Of her previous collection, he wrote, “I’ve waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact The Night Tree is the finest collection I’ve read for ages. What are you waiting for?”
Oxford’s Woodstock Bookshop will be hosting its first in-store poetry event on 20 November, when MSt tutor Jamie McKendrick will be joined by Jennie Feldman to give readings from their most recent collections. Jamie will be reading from Anomaly (Faber & Faber) and The Years (Arc Publications) while Jennie will read from No Cherry Time (Arc Publications).
Entry is free, the event starts at 18:30 and tickets must be booked here.
MSt Course Director, Dr Clare Morgan, will be reading from her new short story collection Scar Tissue at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, at 7pm on Thursday 10 November.
This event is free, but registration is essential, here.
Scar Tissue offers a fresh perspective on the nature of individual existence in all its transient vulnerability. As we travel from Wales and the Marches to places as far away as India, Paris, New England, Scandinavia and Spain, these lyrical, evocative, and searching stories unflinchingly explore the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world. Scar Tissue is published alongside a re-print of Clare’s first collection An Affair of the Heart.
MSt tutor Jenny Lewis’s Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet Classics, 2018) was heralded on publication as being, ‘innovative, graceful, erudite and utterly unputdownable,’ and selected as a book of the year by publications including New Statesman, London Review of Books and The New Yorker.
Gilgamesh Retold has recently been dramatised and will be performed as a verse play in Oxford on Thursday 24 November 2022, 19:30 at St Edmund Hall, alongside The Tyring House, by Lynn Thornton. Tickets available here or at the door.
In a new short story collection published by Seren on 22 September, MSt Director Clare Morgan offers a fresh perspective on the nature of individual existence in all its transient vulnerability.
Scar Tissue ranges broadly in geographic scope. From deep country on the Welsh borders to the metropolitan precinct of London; from the forests of Scandinavia to neatly clapboarded New England; from a Spanish finca to Dulles airport; and from the steamy environs of Mumbai to the cooler spaces of a medieval farmhouse in Snowdonia – all these disparate realms intersect with the perennial human need to belong and the impossibility of doing so.
Seren have, at the same time, republished Morgan’s earlier collection, An Affair of the Heart, in which men and women reckon the worth of relationships past and present, from steamy New Orleans to urbane Paris, from metropolitan Chelsea to the industrial valleys and rural hinterlands of Wales.
In these lyrical, evocative and searching stories, Clare Morgan unflinchingly explores the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world.
John Murray has snapped up a “dark, subversive and surprising” book from MSt alum Christine Anne Foley.
Jocasta Hamilton, publisher, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Bodies at auction from Sara O’Keefe at Aevitas. It will publish in summer 2023.
Hamilton said: “Bodies is urgent and brilliant on the terrifyingly thin lines between love and desire, vulnerability and power, safety and violence, acceptance and rage. It’s a novel of our times and Christine is a brilliant new voice.”
This Thursday, 19 May, there will be poetry readings and discussion with two acclaimed poets, Theophilus Kwek and Mary Jean Chan, who will be in conversation with Niall Munro.
This event will run from 17:30-18:30 in the Mawby Room, Kellogg College. Refreshments will be provided. Places are free and all are welcome. The reading is run in partnership with the Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing.
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