Centre for Creative Writing

Our partnership with Essex Book Festival

In 2014 the Centre for Creative Writing began working in partnership with the Essex Book Festival, which takes place annually in March. The Centre engages in the Festival on many levels, conducting outfacing writing workshops, showcasing work on our MAs in Creative Writing and Wild Writing, organising public readings for members of the Centre and for Essex students, liaising with the Essex Book Festival to establish work-based learning opportunities, and running residential writing workshops (such as that at the Othona Community, Bradwell, 2017).

Our research

All staff in the Centre are actively engaged in research projects, as well as ongoing research into Memory Maps, which has given rise to many book projects – including Quennets (Terry, Carcanet, 2016), Stour Diaries (McCully, Medlar, 2019), The Oak Papers (Canton, Canongate, 2020) – staff are engaged in research into dreaming (Pester, ffytche), myth (May), US avant-gardes (Savage), and camping (De Abaitua).

All our academic staff members are open for PhD supervision if you are interested in studying a postgraduate research degree in Creative Writing. Please browse our staff profiles below and feel free to get in touch if you have any enquiries. 

Archives

Members of the Centre for Creative Writing have been involved in using and setting up Library Archives. These Archives include:

• the Douglas Oliver Archive (the archive of the ex-Essex poet Douglas Oliver) at the Albert Sloman Library
• the J.A. Baker Archive, set up by James Canton in 2016

Douglas Oliver (1937-2000) was a poet, novelist, academic, journalist and translator. He was first associated with the University of Essex in the 1970s. Starting as a mature student, Douglas later became a lecturer in the Literature Department. His collection comprises the notebooks, typescripts, research material, correspondence and printed works, and his Archive has been placed on permanent deposit with the Library by his widow, Alice Notley, and has been augmented by additional material acquired by means of purchase.

The J.A Baker Archive is an important national archive of interest internationally, holding the papers of the seminal Essex-based nature writer J.A. Baker, author of The Peregrine. J.A Baker has had an important impact on the currently resurgent new nature writing.

The archive attracts interest nationally and internationally, with visitors from Cambridge, London, Edinburgh and the United States. The launch event featured leading nature writers Mark Cocker and Jon Fanshawe, and involved public facing talks, and a demonstration of a peregrine in flight.