Isabel Galleymore is a poet, critic and scholar based in Birmingham. Her first collection, Significant Other, won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2020 and her second collection, Baby Schema, is published by Carcanet in March 2024. Her poems have featured in the TLS, LRB, Poetry and The New York Review of Books. Isabel held the position of Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2022-23. She is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.
Everything Change – Writing the Climate
Mon 15 July 2024 - Fri 19 July 2024
Tutors
/ Isabel Galleymore & Owen Sheers
Guest Reader
/ Durre Shahwar
Course Fee
/
From
£675 - £725 per person
Genres
/ FictionNatureNon-FictionPoetryScriptwriting
Language
/ English
“I don’t understand why it’s called Climate Change. It should be called Everything Change.” – Margaret Atwood
The climate and ecological emergencies are no longer issues, but rather an emerging reality – the new global context in which all of us will love, work, think and live. It is, however, also a reality of which only some sections of our society are fully aware; a reality honey-combed by competing narratives and a systemic detachment from the natural world.
This multi-genre course will question the role of writers within the context of the Climate and Ecological Emergencies. How do we represent social injustice, species extinction and extreme weather in our writing? Why should we? To what degree can writing inspire lasting change and help us address injustices? How do we continue to speak of hope in such times of despair? Join award winning writers and experienced tutors Isabel Galleymore and Owen Sheers as they focus on climate poetry, script and fiction and encourage you, no matter your genre, to develop your approach to Climate Writing and apply learning from the course to your own personal projects. Through intensive workshops, one-to-one tutoring and offering yourself the gift of time to write and create in the stunning natural surroundings of Tŷ Newydd, the course will support you in refining and editing your writing and discovering your voice.
This course welcomes experienced and emerging writers alike. We also welcome those who already consider the Climate Emergency as a central theme in their writing alongside those who are only just starting to explore it as a creative topic. The tutors will guide you through your thinking and creative process as you learn to express your feelings and ideas on this vital subject which affects all of us, and all future generations to come.
Tutors
Isabel Galleymore
Owen Sheers
Owen Sheers’ books of poetry include Skirrid Hill (Seren 2004), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, and the verse drama Pink Mist (Faber, 2013), chosen as a Guardian top ten play of the year and winner of the Hay Festival Poetry Medal and Wales Book of the Year. His first novel Resistance (Faber, 2007) was translated into 15 languages and adapted into a film. His most recent novel, I Saw a Man (Faber, 2015) was shortlisted for the Prix Femina étranger. Owen’s BAFTA nominated film-poem The Green Hollow (Faber, 2016) won three BAFTA Cymru awards. To Provide All People (Faber, 2018) is his most recent film-poem, written to mark the 70th anniversary of the NHS. A former NYPL Cullman fellow, Writer-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and Artist in Residence for the Welsh Rugby Union, Owen was the recipient of the 2016 St David’s Award for Culture and the 2018 Wilfred Owen Poetry Award. In 2021 he wrote the climate-focused BBC drama, The Trick, which was nominated for a BAFTA Cymru Award. He is a Trustee and the Co-Founder of Black Mountain College, chair of Wales PEN Cymru and Professor in Creativity at Swansea University.
Guest Reader
Durre Shahwar
Durre Shahwar is a writer and researcher, with a PhD in autofiction, language, and identity from Cardiff University. She is the co-editor of Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature, an essay anthology on nature, climate, and the landscape (2024, 404 INK). Durre is the Deputy Editor of Wasafiri Magazine. Her work has appeared in numerous publications such as Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class (Dead Ink Books), Welsh (Plural) (Repeater Books), and she was also shortlisted and highly commended for the Morley Lit Prize 2022. Durre was the recipient of a Future Wales Fellowship, undertaking a year of creative research around climate justice and art. She was the co-founder of ‘Where I’m Coming From’, an open mic collective that platformed underrepresented writers in Wales.