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.
Category: MSt News
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MSt partners with Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Master of Studies in Creative Writing program at the University of Oxford is proud to be among the global university programs, screenwriting labs and filmmaker programs partnering with the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting program to help identify possible Nicholl fellows.
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Oxford Alumna Sylee Gore Receives National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship
The National Endowment for the Arts has announced that Oxford alumna and author Sylee Gore is one of 35 writers selected to receive an FY 2025 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000. This year’s fellowships are in poetry and enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career development. Fellows are selected through an anonymous review process and are judged on the basis of artistic excellence of the work sample they provided. These fellowships are highly competitive, with more than 2,000 eligible applications received for FY 2025.
NEA Director of Literary Arts Amy Stolls said, “The National Endowment for the Arts’ continued investment in contemporary creative writers preserves, strengthens, and advances our nation’s rich literary traditions. This new group of fellows is the latest in a longstanding legacy of support for poets and prose writers who—through the beauty and power of their words—inspire us, challenge us, and reflect back to us the heart and soul of America’s vast and varied cultural landscape.”
Sylee Gore is a poet who works as a translator for artists and museums. Maximum Summer, her first poetry chapbook, won the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize and is forthcoming from Nion Editions. She received her MSt (Distinction) in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford.
Since 1967, the NEA has awarded more than 3,700 Creative Writing Fellowships totaling over $58 million. Many American recipients of the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction were recipients of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships early in their careers.
Visit arts.gov to browse bios from the 2025 recipients and past Creative Writing Fellows.
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The MSt blog is back!
Hi everyone!
After a brief hiatus, the MSt blog is now back with updates from the new course team: Clare, Amal, Kate, Mary Jean and Barney. We’re kicking off with an entry from Mary Jean, our new Departmental Lecturer in Poetry. Here is what they have been reading and researching lately:
What I’m Reading Now
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
This is a mesmerizing novel which meditates on how we might respond to our world’s multiple crises (ecological or otherwise) – can we flee from them as the protagonist in the novel attempts to do by deciding to live in a convent, and is it in fact possible to keep ourselves safe from the uncomfortable truths we’d rather not look in the eye? The novel asks difficult questions about forgiveness, guilt and how one might live ethically. I loved Wood’s writing style; she has the precision of a poet and draws the reader in with sensual, atmospheric scenes.
James by Percival Everett
I found Everett’s retelling of the classic story of Huckleberry Finn deeply moving and eye-opening. Language is foregrounded in this novel: it becomes a tool for camouflage for slaves who need to appear as if they can’t read or speak eloquently to satisfy the twisted egos and expectations of their white slave owners. I also found the complex friendship between James and Huck to be honest and sincere, and it is ultimately their relationship which constitutes the beating heart of this novel. This is a book which will stay with me for a very long time.
Current Projects / Research
I am researching what ‘queer reading’ means in preparation for the 2025 LGBT+ History Month lecture which I will be giving next year at Oxford. I’ve been excited about a forthcoming book titled The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (2024) and have been returning to the writings of Sara Ahmed for inspiration, particularly Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006). I am also working on an essay for a series in Poetry Magazine called ‘Hard Feelings’, having chosen ‘anger’ as the feeling I’d like to focus on. This is proving to be a hard essay to write indeed, but it has also been a nice excuse for me to return to interesting work by D.W. Winnicott, Alison Bechdel and Darian Leader which are enabling me to think through familiar concepts in a different light.
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