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Review: Chinglish by Sue Cheung

As the new year unfolds, to ‘read more’ is undoubtedly many of our new year’s resolution, mine included. However, for us English students this goal becomes far greater since we aim to read more content not related to our course. My personal challenge of this year being to read more works by BAME authors. Having …

Rethinking the World with Chick Lit

This Christmas, I was gifted Cecelia Ahern’s One Hundred Names from a family member – with their flawed logic being that if I like the Bridget Jones movies, then romance fiction should be right up my street. But when I accidentally packed it to bring back to Uni alongside all my other books, giving it …

Review: Dark Wonders by Joshua Helmer

Dark Wonders is a set of three linked dystopian short stories from Nottingham-based writer Joshua Helmer. Comparisons to Black Mirror are easy to make, as the three stories involve a dark insight into a near future in which different forms of technology have an impact on humans and the world. However, underneath this genre similarity, …

The Myth of Individualism

In the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s latest book Humankind, he researches a real-life version of Lord of the Flies. In June 1965, six boys from Tonga floated out to sea in a stolen boat, and found themselves washed up on a desert island for fifteen months. Unlike William Golding’s novel, however, which ends in brutality …

Catharsis, Comfort and the Contemporary Poetry of Rupi Kaur

Reception of Rupi Kaur’s pared-down poetry divides her readership into those who celebrate her popularisation of poetry (Kaur sold more copies of her debut collection in 2016 than the other top ten poets combined) and those who decry her work as somehow lazy in its brevity, and lacking the vocabulary and sophistication of traditional poetry. …

Alison Moore & The Man Booker Prize

Back in May, fellow author Megan Taylor and I gave a talk at the University of Nottingham called ‘From First Draft to Publication’. I talked about my debut novel The Lighthouse, the first copies of which had just been printed. One of the things I spoke about was the fact that my publishers, Salt, had entered …

Distance Learning Summer School 2012

25-29th June 2012 More than 20 students, including those from both our on-site and distance learning programmes, participated in this year’s Summer School. It was a great experience for everyone involved. It was the perfect opportunity for the distance learning students to meet their tutors and other students, share experiences and expand their knowledge about …