Category: Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Insights Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Book Release: Daughters of the Labyrinth by Professor Ruth Padel, King’s College London

Post author By Graham Fifoot
Post date 21 June 2021

Book Release 1/7/21: Daughters of the Labyrinth by Ruth Padel, Professor of Poetry, King’s College London.

‘A daughter’s passionate quest for the truth about what happened to her parents in Crete during the German occupation and a sumptuous and sensuous evocation of Crete itself, its landscape and culture. ’ – Colm Tóibín

‘She winds us into coils within coils of a family’s dark history, horrific suffering and intimate sacrifice. She combines dramatic storytelling with moving reflectiveness, asking us to think again about whether it is better to remember or forget?’ – Marina Warner

Insights Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

The Fourth Floor: A Short Story

Post author By Harriet Thompson
Post date 3 March 2021

A short story and illustration by Lee Jia-An

“This story is influenced by my reading of Borges, whose works I’ve been researching for my dissertation. I’m interested in the idea of mirrors and repetition in Borges’s short stories and how repetition is indicative of the Eternal Return. This short story is about repetition and how the secrets that we keep hidden from the gaze and the mirror are still echoes of each other. One day, we’ll have to bury them and leave them behind.”

Tags Borges, creative writing, short story

20th - 21st Centuries Contemporary Life writing, Creative writing and Performance Long Read

NewThink: What would happen if we criminalised creative expression?

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 16 February 2021

PhD student George Oliver shares an extract from a short-listed creative writing piece that speculates on the criminalisation of public creative expression…

Tags creative writing, Lotus Eater Magazine, Ouen Press, short stories, Zawadi

20th - 21st Centuries Book Review Contemporary Culture, Text and History Life writing, Creative writing and Performance Long Read

“And I said that, I”: Connie Palmen’s novel Your Story, My Story

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 3 February 2021

by Sylvia Solakidi

In this blog, King’s graduate Sylvia Solakidi explores the role of betrayal in the quest for love and knowledge in Connie Palmen’s novel about the contentious romance of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Tags Birthday Letters, Connie Palmen, Logbook of a Merciless Year, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, The Friendship, Your Story My Story

20th - 21st Centuries Culture, Text and History Insights Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Alienation on the Strand; Solitude in Street Haunting

Post author By Katie Arthur
Post date 6 January 2021

WOOLF’S WRITING HAS BEEN A PART OF MY LIFE FOR SO LONG I NO LONGER KNOW IF IT TAUGHT ME TO SEE THE WORLD THIS WAY OR JUST TAUGHT ME TO NOTICE THAT I DO.

– TRACY SEELEY

There is perhaps no greater comfort nor reward granted by reading than resonance. It is an indescribable liberation to have our feelings corroborated; to sift through the works of writers centuries past and happen upon an unassuming strand of words that instantly articulates the inarticulable, that echoes an acute emotion lying dormant within. These discoveries serve as whispers through time, as a consoling hand-squeeze in the ether. In my first year studying on the Strand, Virginia Woolf’s 1930 essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure offered me this solace.