1. 12/07/2016
Oxford Writers’ House
About Us: Founded in 2015, Oxford Writers’ House was officially launched in the Spring of 2016, as a hub
for community and academic writers in the Universities and City of Oxford. We offer resources for Oxford
writers from all backgrounds, academic and creative writing support, uniquely discussion-based,
interdisciplinary events, and consultancy and networking support for our membership base.
While the University of Oxford currently offers two exclusive and college-based degree-conferring
programmes for creative writing, and a part time creative writing scheme, there is no “hub” for writing as
such across disciplines within the University and little strategic outreach to the regional community.
Oxfordshire is a national centre for literature, publishing, journalism and editing but there is an absence of
a centralised community and facilities for interest groups to engage in the development of collaborative
projects and cross sector interests.
Oxford Writers’ House will operate across organisations, disciplines, and research interests, and provide
a much-needed space for salon-style conversations and meetings about writing, publication, and editing.
The network hopes to be able to rent space in Oxford to create a physical location for the community.
OWH’s online presence would provide an events calendar for both city and University events, and
connect students to writing and publishing events throughout the city. Provided more funding is found
after our pilot scheme, OWH would seek to model itself after the highly successful partnership between
University of East Anglia and Writers’ Centre, Norwich, which has, for years, been connecting creative
writers from all disciplinary and research backgrounds to the international writing community.
So far:
Earlier this year, meetings with Chris Gribble at Writers’ Centre, Norwich, and Nial Munro and Claire Cox
at Oxford Brookes’ proved fruitful and inspiring. Chris, Nial, and Claire offered practical business advice,
and expressed the view that demand for the services Oxford Writers’ House will offer is exceptionally high
in the region. We are keen to build a bridge between the Universities and the broader community.
However, we need to first establish a presence online, and have a permanent meeting space for events.
At the beginning of July, OWH began an incubation scheme with The Danson Foundation through St
Anne’s College.
We have held two sell-out events:
Styled after the salon rather than the lecture hall and with interdisciplinary themes.
“The Spoken Word” In partnership with St. Anne’s College Arts Week, titled , featured a conversation
between academics, poets who recite from memory, rappers, and writers, on the subject of the oral
tradition.
“How I Write”, With Phillip Pullman at Waterstones Oxford discussed writers and thinkers on the subject of
their writing process.
“How to Publish” -- an event connecting young writers and creative thinkers from all disciplines to the
publishing community.
Have a preliminary membership base of ..
/ Mailing list?

2. Established an advisory board of some of the most respected local representatives endorsing us and who
will lend support to the project
We are currently developing processes:
The network will connect mentors to students who need help or support developing their creative prose,
poetry and essay or general writing skills. Courses in writing will be offered by graduate mentors. These
will be charged reasonable fee to help subsidize our core operation costs and also at subsidised rates for
disenfranchised groups.
We are designing numerous publications. These include:
A Monthly “in house” magazine
A curated annual “best of Oxford” publication, to be produced annually and distributed to publishing
houses, our membership and wider audiences.
The OWH website is under development
Project Outline:
Phase Two: Over the summer, we will be putting together a business model and approaching additional
sources of funding and partnership, using the data collected from We will set ourselves up as a
community business. We have already been promised several thousand pounds of support from
prominent Oxford alumni,
Phase Three: By Michaelmas, we hope to have collected enough funds to support events and a
publication for the 2016-2017 academic year. We will host two big events every term. We may advertise
for one or two permanent staff members during the third stage of our development, depending on funding
options. Throughout the year, we will grow our network, host conversations, publish a curated collection
of Oxford-based work, and build a support framework for student writing and authorship. By the following
year, we hope to have established a community that is financially sustainable from year to year.
Going Forward: We hope to facilitate community outreach projects and develop a volunteer base. Provide
careers advice, support and networking. Facilitate competitions at local, regional national and
international levels. Develop a cohesive and dynamic literary output across disciplines and stakeholders
in the area.
Core Members
Contact Us:
Program Directors, 2016-2017
Director
Theophilus Kwek
contact: theophiluskwek@gmail.com
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3. Theophilus is the author of three collections, They Speak Only Our Mother Tongue (2011), Circle Line
(2013) - shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014 - and Giving Ground (2016). He won the
Jane Martin Prize in 2015 and the New Poets Prize in 2016, and was president of the Oxford University
Poetry Society. He also works with Asymptote and The Oxford Culture Review.
Operations Manager, Senior Tutor
Dr. David K O’Hara
contact: dkohara50@gmail.com
David earned his PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature at Bath Spa University, where he
supplemented his thesis with a novel. He has taught in a number of different contexts over the years —
from undergraduates to international students, from mature students to those of high school age —
leading courses in both literature and creative writing. Core subject areas include Twentieth Century
British and American Literature as well as English Composition, Film Studies, and Continental
Philosophy. His writing has been featured in various publications from The Believer to Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction.
Creative Director
Asiyla Radwan:
contact: asiyla@gmail.com
Asiyla is an artist and designer studying Fine Art at Oxford University, she works across print and digital
media. Her work has been exhibited around Oxfordshire and featured in the Jericho Review. As a visiting
artist and organiser, she has given creative workshops on film and practical design at Nine Worlds,
Willowbrook Festival and VidUKon.
Events Director
Liv Constable-Maxwell
Liv is a third year English student at St Anne’s College. She is currently Fiction Editor of The ISIS
Magazine, and Founding Editor of the Jericho Arts Review. She ran weekly writing workshops for the
Oxford University Poetry Society this year, and was also Arts Rep for St Anne’s College. She has written
regularly for New Statesman magazine.
Founder
Dr. April Pierce
contact: april.nieuwsma@gmail.com
April grew up in the Silicon Valley, California. She received a BA in Literature and Philosophy from Boston
College, an MA from the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Program at New York University, and a DPhil in
English Literature from the University of Oxford in 2016. She is former president of the Oxford University
Poetry Society, and an RAI scholar. She tutors throughout the University of Oxford, and has published
essays, criticism, fiction, and poetry.
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4. Advisory Board:
Advisory Board:
Philip Pullman
Philip is the author of several best-selling books, most notably the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and
the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In 2008, The Times
named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945”.
Professor Seamus Perry
Seamus is Chair of the English Faculty Board at the University of Oxford, and Professor of English
Literature. A Fellow and Tutor at Balliol College, professor Perry writes reviews for the Times Literary
Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the Literary Review, and has published broadly in the field
of English Romantic poetry and Modern History of Criticism. He served for five years as a member of the
Advisory Council of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. He was elected a Fellow
of the English Association in 2005.
Elleke Boehmer
Elleke is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing
Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of
Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature and
theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan
African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and
identity; nationalism; terrorism; J.M. Coetzee, Katherine Mansfield, and Nelson Mandela; and life writing.
Sir Andrew Motion
Andrew is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from
1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online
resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President
of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson. He is now Homewood Professor
in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore.
Amit Chaudhuri
Amit is an Indian English author and academic. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, Indian
government's highest literary honour, in 2002 for his novel A New World. He is currently Professor of
Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. In 2012, he won the Infosys Prize for
Humanities-Literary Studies for his literary criticism.
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5. Kate Clanchy
Born in Scotland, Kate is a teacher, freelance writer, and journalist. Kate is a Creative Writing Fellow of
Oxford Brookes University, and one of the writers-in-residence at the charity First Story.. Her poetry and
seven radio plays have been broadcast by BBC Radio. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian
newspaper; her work appeared in The Scotsman, the New Statesman and Poetry Review. She has won
numerous awards for her work, including the Eric Gregory Award, the Forward Poetry Prize, the BBC
National Short Story Award, and the Costa Book Award for First Novel.
Professor James Basker:
Steering Committee:
Sarah Howe
Sarah is a Hong Kong-born British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto &
Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award,
and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First
Collection. Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England
as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory
Award from the Society of Authors.
Dr Sally Bayley
Sally is a Teaching and Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Insititute, University of Oxford and
a Lecturer in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She has written widely on visual responses to
literature, including a jointly-authored study of Sylvia Plath’s relationship to the visual arts: Eye Rhymes:
Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (OUP, 2007) and a study of Plath as a cultural icon, Representing Sylvia
Plath (CUP, 2011). Sally has just completed a book of narrative non-fiction: The Private Life of the Diary:
from Pepys to Tweets.
Jamie McKendrick
Jamie was born in Liverpool in 1955, and lives in Oxford, where he writes and teaches. He is the author of
six collections of poetry: The Sirocco Room (1991); The Kiosk on the Brink (1993), winner of the Southern
Arts Literature Award and selected for the New Generation Poets promotion; The Marble Fly (1997),
winner of the Forward Poetry Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice; Ink Stone (2003), shortlisted for
the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award; Crocodiles & Obelisks (2007),
shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Poetry Prize; and Out There (2012), winner of the Hawthornden Prize.
His translation of Valerio Magrelli's The Embrace: Selected Poems (published in a U.S. bilingual edition
as Vanishing Points) won the 2010 John Florio Prize for Italian Translation and the 2010 Oxford-
Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and his translation of the poetry of Antonella Anedda, Archipelago, is due to
be published in 2014.
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6. Tom Cook
Tom was born in Lancashire, before joining Oxford’s Creative Writing MSt studied English at the
University of Hull. In 2013 he was a visiting poet at the University of Iowa, and in 2014 was awarded the
Philip Larkin Memorial Prize. He was co-editor of The Mays in 2015, and is the current editor of Ash
magazine, the journal of the Oxford University Poetry Society. His poetry and criticism has featured in the
New Statesman, Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, Ambit, Partisan and elsewhere. He lives in north
Oxford, where works for the Bodleian’s English Faculty Library.
Dan Holloway
Dan is a novelist, journalist and spoken word artist who most recently appeared at the Burton Taylor
Theatre performing his spoken fairytale Stitch. He was winner of Literary Death Match in 2010, was a
finalist in the 2016 National Poetry Slam, and in 2011 his thriller The Company of Fellows was voted
Blackwell's readers' favourite novel set in Oxford.
Dr. Eleni Philippou
Eleni completed her DPhil in English Literature at New College, Oxford University. She is currently
teaching across a wide spectrum of theoretical and literary topics at Oxford University, while holding a
postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Johannesburg. She is the Coordinator of Oxford
Comparative Criticism and Translation, an Oxford-based research programme. She is an active poet, with
a number of her poems published in both British and international anthologies and journals.
Dr. Matthew Bevis
Matthew runs a popular poetry discussion group called the Salutation & Cat. He is a University Lecturer
and Fellow in English at Keble College.
Noreen Masud
Noreen is fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in collaboration with the Professor
Paul Slack Studentship at Linacre College, Oxford.
Kiran Millwood-Hargrave
Kiran is a poet, playwright and novelist. Her debut novel is out in the UK with Chicken House Books in
May 2016, and in the USA with Knopf in July.
Alan Buckley
Alan is a local poet, who is active in the poetry scene at Oxford Brookes and the Catweazle Club. His
pamphlet shiver was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice for summer 2009.
Nathan Hamilton
Nathan is a poet and publisher. He runs The Publishing Project at University of East Anglia and was
chairman of the board of directors for Inpress. His poetry and criticism have appeared in The Guardian,
The Spectator, The Rialto, Five Dials, The Manhattan Review and The Wolf. He co-edited the popular
antholog-zine series for emerging poetry, Stop Sharpening Your Knives, and his Dear World And
Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe) was published in February, 2013. @NathanHamilton.
Francis (Frank) Hutton-Williams
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7. Francis is an academic researcher and teacher of British and Irish literature with a side interest in media
and communications. He completed a DPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford (2011-14) and then
worked as a postdoctoral research assistant for the Oxford Faculty of English Language and Literature
(2015). He is currently preparing his first monograph for OUP on Irish literature.
Other Support From:
Campus Society
St. Anne’s College
The Danson Foundation
University of Oxford
Said Business School
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