Visit Royal Holloway’s Egham campus on Tuesday 3rd June for an evening of poetry in our iconic Founder’s Building. This special edition of the Small Press Takeover features a trio ecopoets exploring the intersections between creative practice, ecology, and biodiversity - Clare Goulet, Sarah Westcott, and Helena Hunter 🌱🍄🟫🪷🌊🦇🔬
Clare Goulet is a British/Québécoise hybrid raised in Nova Scotia and Staffordshire. Recent work is Graphis scripta: writing lichen (Gaspereau Press), shortlisted for the J. M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award and longlisted for a League of Canadian Poets national award; and Symbiotic, an outdoor lichen-poem trail at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts. Essays, poems, and mixed media forms have been published, reprinted, and presented in Canada, Ireland, the US and the UK. She co-edited Lyric Ecology on the work of philosopher Jan Zwicky, with new book Closer out later this year. She teaches and runs the writing centre at MSVU in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Sarah Westcott’s latest pamphlets are Pond (The Braag, 2024) written in collaboration with a garden pond, and Almanac - a hand-stitched pamphlet with Coast to Coast to Coast (2025). She has published two collections with Pavilion Poetry, Liverpool University Press, and is currently researching inter-species poetry as part of an AHRC-funded PhD.
Helena Hunter works at the intersections of visual art, poetry and science. She holds a Master’s degree in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and is currently pursuing an AHRC-funded PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University in partnership with the University of Warwick. Her practice incorporates fieldwork and laboratory studies, as well as archival research and collaborative projects with scientists, to investigate the critical ecologies of environmental change. She was recently an artist in residence at the Scottish Association for Marine Sciences. Her work has been showcased internationally at venues such as the Wellcome Collection, Gasworks, Arts Catalyst, Tate Modern, ICA.
Tony White, our brilliant Royal Literary Fund fellow, will be reading from his new novel Phantom at the Feast at a reading is run by the Royal Holloway Creative Writing MA:
**17 June, 6pm at Stewart House, Royal Holloway London Graduate School**
Tony’s new novel the follow-up to his fantastic 2018 novel The Fountain in the Forest, and sees the continuing adventures of Detective Sergeant Rex King:
"Police stations are outdated, and AI’s make more efficient detectives, or so says a UK Home Office determined to make cuts.
"When the sole witness in a trafficking case is discovered brutally murdered, a brass horseshoe forced between his teeth, Detective Sergeant Rex King is summoned back to London and into a labyrinth of memory, music, and political unrest.
"From The Clash’s ragged 1985 busking tour to the fractured legacy of the anti-nuclear movement, Rex follows threads that tug uncomfortably at his own history – echoes he can’t quite place, shadows that refuse to settle.
"When Rex’s boss, DCI ‘Lollo’ Lawrence, suddenly disappears, and long-buried papers from the Miners’ Strike surface, he must work alongside a sharp young detective, a seasoned former soul boy, and the National Crime Agency’s unsettlingly brilliant new AI.
"Yet the deeper he travels, the more he finds the investigation folding back on him: professional loyalties strained, personal relationships tested, and accusations from his undercover past threatening to unmake him.
"Two murders, one ‘misper’ and a force under fire – has former ‘spycop’ DS Rex King finally met his match?"
Congratulations to finalist Anita Jergic!
Her story, “The Night the Pamonian Sea Swelled Up”, has just been published in Issue 7 of Vellichor literary magazine.
This story was part of Anita’s CW3020 Fiction project.
Have a read through the link below:
/onxxj/qxid/#p=225
Well done Anita!
Julia Bell, Professor of New Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, will be in conversation with novelist Dr Doug Cowie, Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, both at Royal Holloway, University of London.
**Online: Monday 11 May, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM**
For ticket link to this online event, see bio!
What happens when we lose the spaces where people sit together and practice thinking collectively?
At a moment when technology has created collective ADD (smartphones reducing attention by 39%), when adult education funding has dropped 45%, and when evening courses are disappearing, what happens when we lose the spaces where people sit and practice thinking together?
For 25 years, Julia Bell has taught creative writing to working adults at Birkbeck, University of London. In her new book Between the Lines: Life Lessons from the Creative Writing Workshop (Simon & Schuster, May 2026), she argues that the writing workshop is one of the last spaces where we practice collective attention, empathy, and democratic thinking in an age of algorithmic isolation.
Written in live-action classroom scenes rather than craft instruction, the book places readers inside the room as a Kosovan refugee writes about frozen ready meals sent to her camp, as an online troll learns empathy through a vampire story, as a Black British student is told to 'write what she knows' and refuses to stay in her box.
In an age of distraction and polarisation, Bell shows how workshops nurture sustained attention and understanding and create spaces where people can come together to think across their differences.
Julia Bell’s essay Radical Attention, drawing on Simone Weil's philosophy, is being republished in July 2026 with a new introduction by Grace Blakeley. She is also the author of the memoir-in-verse Hymnal and co-editor of The Creative Writing Coursebook.
Congratulations to Matt Thorne, Associate Professor in Creative Writing, who recently launched his new book FAMOUS: Ego, Envy and Ambition in Pop, Rock and Hip Hop at INK@84 BOOKS in north London.
FAMOUS is Matt’s first book since his monumental biography of Prince, and examines seven moments in music when stars from pop, rock and hip-hop have come together and how the resulting reverberations impacted everything from the culture at large to the decisions of world leaders.
A good time was had by all at the launch party, including (l-r):
1) Lesley Thorne, author Matt Thorne, novelist and songwriter Willy Vlautin, and manager Chris Metzler
2) novelist Chris Manby, author Matt Thorne, novelist Lisa Jewell, novelist Victoria Routledge, novelist Lulu Taylor, and Henry Wickham
3) novelist Professor Ben Markovits and author Hannah Ross
4) authors Candida Meyrick and Sarah Waters
5) Dr Joanna Brown and artist Simon Leahy-Clark
6) Royal Holloway professors Bob Eaglestone and Dell Olsen.
Congratulations to Professor Adam Roberts, who recently gave his inaugural lecture, entitled “Enchantments of Fantasy: a Short History of the Mode”, to an enthusiastic audience of students and faculty.
Royal Holloway's inaugural lectures are public talks given by academics when they are awarded the title of professor at Royal Holloway. It's a chance for them to share the new things they've been discovering, and for us to celebrate their research and achievements.
Adam is an expert on science fiction and fantasy literature and an acclaimed author of both, as well as a scholar of the Romantic and Victorian periods. He has recently published Fantasy: A Short History, which is set to become a definitive account of the genre, and was described in the Guardian just last Sunday as a book in which the origins of the genre are "brilliantly and subtly analysed."
Congratulations to our BA and MA graduate Caroline Söderlund!!!
Caroline was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Hope Prize Award, for her short story "The Pond Mermaid".
It was chosen from a field of over 2500 short stories. Well done!
The Hope Prize is an international short story competition open to writers worldwide aged 18 and over. It seeks powerful, original stories of hope, courage or resilience, whether fiction or non-fiction.
Shortlisted stories will be published in a Simon & Schuster anthology, with 100% of royalties supporting the Hope Prize's 2025 charity partner CAMFED, a global leader in girls’ education and women’s empowerment across Africa.
