Little beasts: experiments with nature writing
June 25, 2024
I discovered a love of lyric essays during my MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham. Before this, I wrote mostly fiction, and toiled on novels. But there was also a weird form of writing I couldn’t categorise, which was more instinctive. I would write these little stream-of-consciousness prose poems but I didn’t really know that’s …
The Balancing Path
June 5, 2024
University, the land of opportunity. You finally crested the hill of qualifications, applications, decisions, and dilemmas; it’s time to choose your own path. You breathe a sigh of relief and gaze out at the horizon ahead; its shifting colours and flashes of light are indistinct, but promising. As September arrives and the leaves start to …
Review: Chinglish by Sue Cheung
March 15, 2021
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
February 19, 2021
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 …
The Myth of Individualism
June 1, 2020
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 …
Review: Ted Chiang’s Short Story Collections
January 30, 2020
Reading short stories is a satisfying use of leisure time for when you’re busy or just have a short attention span. It’s also vital to getting through the Creative Writing module. For me, there is no greater master of short stories than Chinese-American sci-fi author Ted Chiang. One of the most prestigious, least prolific authors …
National Storytelling Week
January 28, 2013
National Storytelling Week brings back memories for me, though not the kind you’d expect, as I recently picked up a copy of D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. I first heard of David Foster Wallace in the Spring of 1996 when Infinite Jest hit the bookshops …
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