Welcome to Oxford University’s MSt in Creative Writing blog, a resource for Oxford events, calls for submission, competitions, news and interviews where you can keep in touch with our community of tutors and alumni.
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.
More information here.
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In her new book, Dr Anna Beer investigates the lives and achievements of eight women writers, uncovering a startling and unconventional history of literature.
Eve Bites Back places the female contemporaries of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton centre stage in the history of literature in English, uncovering stories of dangerous liaisons and daring adventures. From Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet, to Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, these are the women who dared to write.
More information here.
This timely and intimate work from MSt tutor and award-winning playwright Barney Norris (The Remains Of The Day) and his father, the internationally acclaimed pianist and broadcaster David Owen Norris, examines that age-old story of a boy and his dad, and how they can relate to one another, in every sense of the word.
An intimate, autobiographical exploration of their relationship, The Wellspring, takes us inside the complex and shifting dynamic between this particular father and son, exploring the
people and stories that shape us.
Directed by Jude Christian, their performances are accompanied by exquisite music performed by David.
More details here.
A companion book to the landmark BBC2 television documentary series to be broadcast from April to June 2022, Brilliant Isles tells the turbulent story of British creativity through 80 stunning works or art, music, literature and architecture.
MSt tutor Rebecca Abrams took part in an event in early March concerning the Arts and Restorative Justice, talking about how she researched and wrote her play The Meeting Room.
The session can be watched here, and here is a link to the blog Rebecca wrote which explains a bit more, both about the playwrighting process and her passion for and belief in the restorative justice process.
In the Oxford Centre for Life Writing Weinrebe Lecture, Helen Mort will discuss her forthcoming book, A Line Above the Sky, which melds memoir and nature writing to ask why humans are drawn to danger, and how we can find freedom in pushing our limits. It is a visceral love letter to losing oneself in physicality, whether climbing a mountain or bringing a child into the world, and an unforgettable celebration of womanhood in all its forms.
You can book for the lecture here, and find more information about the book here.
