Category Archives: Interviews

Interviews

Liberal Arts undergraduate student wins poetry prize!

Issy Craig-Wood, a Liberal Arts BA student in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities, won a poetry competition for her piece ‘Love Can Give You This Cool Shark (Journal Entry).’

Image: A Ptychodus fossil specimen, which inspired Issy’s poem. (Wikimedia Commons)

The contest, which was organised by the Young Poets Network in The Poetry Society, awarded a prize to the best poem on the theme of Poetry as (Optimistic) Prophecy.

Issy’s entry was submitted from her journal, where she writes poetry as a tool to shape her thoughts into something concrete, with intention, patterns and meaning.

I was very surprised to win this competition, the poem was written when I was very tired and submitted on an utter whim. I read the prompt for optimistic prophecy, and it linked in so well with my journal entry that I decided to submit it to the competition. I was not expecting to win, I just needed somewhere to put my thoughts that felt more significant than just on paper.

-Issy Craig-Wood, Liberal Arts BA student.

The poem was inspired by a fossilised shark uncovered in Mexico, the struggle to be optimistic, and the future of Quakerism, which Issy has been involved with since childhood.

Dr Alan Marshall, Reader in American Literature in the Department of English, was impressed by the depth of Issy’s poem.

The poem begins with a detail that seems accidental and gratuitous, but which also suggests the mysterious depths of the earth, of the ocean – a shark! But the speaker is also interested in love, hope, and learning to “look after others.” The poem seems to ask what the relationship might be between our impulse to look after others and how we respond to a creature like a shark (or a dinosaur), which on the surface doesn’t need looking after. The connective tissue is responsive joy – the readiness to take pleasure in the world we find around us, expressed as a T-shirt (“I could make that”). The poem as a T-shirt.
– Dr Alan Marshall, Reader in American Literature.
19th Century, Book Review, Insights, Interviews

New Book Releases: ‘Irish London: A Cultural History 1850-1916’

By Richard Kirkland

Written by Professor of Irish Literature & Cultural Theory Richard Kirkland, Irish London: A Cultural History 1850-1916 was published by Bloomsbury in September 2021, and has a paperback release forthcoming in 2022.

What drew you to this subject?

I’ve always written about Irish culture – it’s been my life really – and in the area of Camden where I live the history of Irish London is inescapable and compelling. So I hoped the book would be a way of connecting my research interests with my day-to-day experience and the friends I have here. I’ve also thought a good deal about London itself over the years, partly because it is such a strong research and teaching area in the English department. In fact, so many of the events I describe in the book happened within a few hundred yards of what is now the Virginia Woolf Building!

Continue reading New Book Releases: ‘Irish London: A Cultural History 1850-1916’ →

20th - 21st Centuries, Book Review, Insights, Interviews

New Book Releases: ‘Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction’

By James Baxter

Written by London-based independent scholar James Baxter, Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction: Problems in Postmodernism was published by Palgrave Macmillan in December 2021, as part of their series ‘New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty First Century.’

What drew you to this subject?

At the outset, I think it was an intuited connection between a lot of the fiction that I was reading and enjoying at the time; Beckett of course, but also American writers like Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, etc. A lot of headache-inducing postmodern stuff. While there is certainly no shortage of scholarship on Beckett’s relation to the more theoretical body of postmodernism, I was quite struck by the absence of any sustained work on literary postmodernism and the way Beckett skewers the work of periodisation by serving as an end but also a beginning for this new paradigm (not unlike the kind of stalled narrative sequences that a reader encounters in his mid-century Trilogy).

Continue reading New Book Releases: ‘Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction’ →

Insights, Interviews

INDUCTION WEEK SOMERSETTING TAKEOVER: FIRST YEAR MODULE EARLY MODERN LITERARY CULTURE

Each year, departing third-year students in our department put together a guide for arriving first years. This year’s magazine – titled “Somersetting” – offers a student perspective on studying English at King’s and addresses some issues of concern for new students. During induction week, the blog will be spotlighting sections of this year’s magazine. 

For today, we have an insight into the module ‘Early Modern Literary Culture’, including a chat with Dr Sarah Lewis, the module convenor.

Continue reading INDUCTION WEEK SOMERSETTING TAKEOVER: FIRST YEAR MODULE EARLY MODERN LITERARY CULTURE →

Interviews, Long Read

Induction Week Somersetting Takeover: Interview with Dr Carl Kears

By Carl Kears and Cornelia Sheppard Dawson

Each year, departing third-year students in our department put together a guide for arriving first years. This year’s magazine – titled “Somersetting” – offers a student perspective on studying English at King’s and addresses some issues of concern for new students. During induction week, the blog will be spotlighting sections of this year’s magazine.

First up… Cornelia Sheppard Dawson interviews Dr Carl Kears, Head of First Year and Lecturer in Medieval Literature.

Continue reading Induction Week Somersetting Takeover: Interview with Dr Carl Kears →