Creative Writing Space
Current and former PhD students in Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham will present and showcase excerpts of their work and will lead a question and answer session about ‘writing’ and ‘writing in the context of a PhD.’
Creative Writing Space
The workshop is free but please book a place in advance.
- Date: Tuesday 3 May
- Time: 1 to 2.30 pm
- Place: E07 Monica Partridge Building, with additional option to attend online
Book your place
The creative writers
James Aitcheson
A novelist, writing tutor, literary consultant, medieval scholar, and Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. A professional writer since 2010, he is the author of four novels set in medieval England. His most recent title, The Harrowing, was published in 2016 and named by The Times as a Book of the Month. He received his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham in 2021. His research interests include historical fiction, medievalism (the representation of the Middle Ages in modern culture), and astronomy in early medieval England.
Amy van Kesteren
A University of Nottingham alumnus with a BA (hons) in English and Creative Writing, and an MA in Creative Writing by the University of Nottingham, and received her PhD in Creative Writing in 2021, also by the University of Nottingham. Her PhD consisted of two parts: a Gothic novel and a critical essay reflecting on the creative development of the novel’s themes. Her research explores the relationships between the Gothic and the uncanny at the intersection of loss and resurrection. She suggested that the Gothic, in its set conventions, is a genre that speaks of loss, while the uncanny negotiates the return of the loss - whatever it may be - through resurrection, repetition and re-creation. When faced with loss in Gothic Fiction, the uncanny experience finds its place in the return. In her novel, Hollow, we witness loss in many forms -in the loss of place, the loss of self, and the loss of a loved one in death. We see these losses returned to us, as the Gothic and the uncanny meet: the re-creation and the duplication of place, the construction of the self, the return of the dead to reside again among the living. Since graduating, she has been working on editing the novel, experiencing (with a sort of mild horror) the strange and extraordinary journey that is Creative Writing after the PhD.
Lizzie Alblas
A poet and PhD Student in Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham. Her project, ‘Women of World Mythology and Folklore: A Poetic Re-Imagining of Cultural Stories and Figures’, focuses on uncovering stories concerning female figures from world mythology and folklore throughout history. She subsequently explores and interprets their stories through poetics, creating an accessible poetry collection that she aims to publish. This collection seeks to explore and reassess myths, legends, and folktales through a modern, feminist lens, expanding upon themes of female agency, marginalisation, sexual assault, and ecofeminism, among others.
This creative work will be accompanied by a series of creative-critical essays which investigate how contemporary authors have interrogated myths and folk tales to analyse both modern and historically documented female experiences. These essays focus on fragmentation as both a critical mode and an act of gendered violence; the relationship between women and art as a form of pedagogy; and women deriving power from the natural world, examined through an ecofeminist lens.
Veronica Layunta-Maurel
A writer, therapist and a third year PhD candidate in Creative Writing. Her project, ‘The Power of Storytelling as a Tool for Re-authoring Identity in Collective and Transgenerational Trauma’ focuses on revisiting and fictionalising personal, family and collective history around post-civil war Spain and the present, in the form of a novel and an autoethnographic critical theory essay. Both her fictional and auto-ethnographic work explores the nature of memory, and how writing fiction can be a valid research and therapeutic method that, rather than merely retelling the past, may co-create new empowering narratives around collective trauma, bringing meaning to the experience and the memory of it, and re-constructing the identity of the author.
Stephanie Limb
An essayist from Derbyshire. She's currently working on an AHRC PhD, which is a creative/critical hybrid project called 'The Monstrous Mother'. Her work has appeared in Litro, The Moth, Stand, Blackbox Manifold and other journals. Her book: My Coleridge – a collection of essays about Sara Coleridge and motherhood – was published by Broken Sleep Books in October 2020.
Amanda-Marie Kale
A writer, lecturer and PhD researcher based at the University of Nottingham. Amanda specializes in creative non-fiction, experimental life-writing and memoir studies. Her project combines creative exploration and critical research; investigating the narratological implications of child narration within true-life narratives whilst producing her own child-narrated memoir, an itinerant coming-of-age in a maladjusted family spanning the breadth and diversity of continental United States.
Grace Carter
A first year Creative Writing PhD student with a keen interest in poetry, crafting and communities. Her work aims to highlight the intersections between poetry, needlework and activism. As part of this, she is researching the ways in which poetry and needlework (namely knitting, sewing and even quilting) can and have been combine3d, and how one practice may influence the other. She is equally concerned with the current and historical use of needlework as a form of protest, or an expression of solidarity. Throughout her project, she intends to produce a series of poems which respond to these examples.
Karen Packwood
A first year Creative Writing PhD student at University of Nottingham. Her thesis, Landscapes of Belonging: Representing Trauma and Post-Abuse Identity Reclamation is an auto-fictional memoir written as a meditation whilst walking the South Welsh coast. Responding to the ocean, sand and cliffs, Karen critically examines one woman’s quest to reclaim her post-abuse authentic self. These topographical features represent her voice, emotions, and thoughts respectively and correlate with the poetics of loss, exile and return, forgetting and remembrance featured in the work of W.G. Sebald.