Words Matter.

Please join us in person for a special lunchtime research seminar at 1pm on 8 June 2022 in QS/111.

Futuristic Worldbuilding: Speculation and Hope in Contemporary Turkey

Assoc Prof Dr Emrah Atasoy, Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Oxford.

This talk will introduce scholarship on speculative fiction in Turkey and give a contextual survey of the tradition of entangled futurities and speculative worldbuilding in contemporary Turkey. Discussion of the selected primary text will reveal the portrayal of hope, environmental breakdown, and speculation in the Anthropocene.

This interdisciplinary event will be of interest across the humanities and social sciences, including sociology, history, geography, and politics/IR.

Hope to see you all there!

Study Development are running two workshop strands this semester. 

If you’d like some guidance on reflective writing, head to CD/006 on Thursday 10th March, 5-6.30 pm. There is also an online session on Thursday 31st March, 5-6.30 pm.

For help setting your goals, there are online sessions every Monday from 28th February to 28th March from 9.30-10 am. Goal setting and writing retreats are on Monday lunchtimes (times and rooms at the link below). For some structured writing time, you can join online every Friday lunchtime.

For more detail, click here.

Please see below for a brilliant opportunity to find out more about careers opportunities for students from the Royal Society of Literature!

FREE for all. Feb 1 2022.

Our annual event, chaired by RSL Fellow Edmund Gordon, explores the varied working lives of those in the literature sector, and how to get started in your own career in words. During this 90-minute Zoom webinar, each panellist will speak about their own work, followed by an opportunity for you to ask questions to people who have been there and done it.

This year, we will hear from: a renowned literary agent; a Literature Officer at Creative Scotland; a T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet and Professor of Creative Writing; and the Programme Manager from Manchester Poetry Library. We hope their journeys will inspire you as you embark on your own career in literature.

Book Online 

Martin Kratz is Programme Manager at Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work includes developing their collection through events programming and he is particularly passionate about their collection of poetry in Manchester’s community languages and poetry in recording. After completing his MA Creative Writing and PhD at Manchester Metropolitan, Martin worked on Manchester’s successful bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature. He was co-editor of Penned in the Margin’s Mount London and the author of a poetry pamphlet, A Skeleton’s Progress. His translations of the poetry of Nelly Sachs and Jusuf Naoum appeared in The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature.

Sinéad Morrissey FRSL is the author of six poetry collections and was appointed Belfast’s inaugural Poet Laureate. Her accolades include first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her collections Through the Square Window and Parallax received the Irish Times Poetry Prize. Sinéad won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2013 and The Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2017. In 2020, she received the European Poet of Freedom Award for her collection On Balance, translated into Polish by Magdalena Heydel. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Emma Paterson joined literary agency Aitken Alexander Associates in 2018 after eight years at Rogers, Coleridge & White and The Wylie Agency. Emma became a member of the Booker Prize Foundation Advisory Committee and was made a Director of Aitken Alexander in 2020. She was recently included in British Vogue’s list of 25 influential women shaping 2021 and beyond.

Katalina Watt’s work was longlisted for Penguin Write Now 2020 and has been published in Haunted Voices, Unspeakable, and Extra Teeth among others. In 2021 she received a Writers Grant from Ladies of Horror Fiction and has appeared at festivals and literary events including Edinburgh International Book Festival, Cymera, and FIYAHCON. Katalina is Literature Officer at Creative Scotland and Audio Director for khōréō, a speculative fiction magazine for immigrant and diaspora authors.

Edmund Gordon is the author of The Invention of Angela Carter, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and an RSL Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Financial Times, the Guardian, Independent and New Statesman. He teaches literature and creative writing at King’s College London and is a regular contributor to The Sunday Times, TLS and the London Review of Books.

Founded in 1820, the RSL acts as a voice for the value of literature, honouring and supporting emerging and established writers whilst creating a bridge between authors and audiences to engage as many people as possible with the breadth of UK literature.

In partnership with

Adam Kirkbride, postgraduate student on our MA in Contemporary Literature, reflects on our annual departmental Words Matter Lecture. There is a link to the lecture recording at the bottom of this post.

Since coming to York St John, the Words Matter lecture has been something that I look forward to every year without fail. For those who may not be aware, the Words Matter lecture is a staple of the autumn term, an evening of wine, literature, and inspiration where we watch one of the English Literature team deliver a lecture on their current area of research.

This year’s Words Matter lecture was delivered by Dr Saffron Vickers Walkling on the topic of “Hamlet and the Legacy of 1989”. I must confess that before this lecture I was something of a Hamlet-phobe (as Dr Vickers Walkling pointed out, “Hamlet talks about revenging his father for nearly four hours”). Nevertheless, through the magic of the Words Matter lecture, I emerged from the lecture theatre with a newfound appreciation for Shakespeare’s moodiest protagonist.

Dr Vickers Walkling’s interest in political adaptations of Hamlet began in Japan in 1995, when they watched a modern dress, Mandarin Chinese appropriation of Hamlet. This appropriation, first performed five years prior in a period of major political events and economic change, was the beginning of a fascination with politically charged, iconoclastic adaptations of Shakespeare’s most famous play. Across the course of the lecture, Dr Vickers Walkling discussed three adaptations of Hamlet, Lin Zhaohua’s Mandarin Chinese appropriation (1990/1995), Jan Klata’s “H.” (2004/2006), and Sulayman Al Bassam’s “The Al-Hamlet Summit” (2002/2004). Continue reading “The 2021 Words Matter Lecture reviewed by Adam Kirkbride: Dr Saffron Vickers Walkling on Hamlet.”