Professor Andy Brown - Inaugural Lecture
Professor Andy Brown - Inaugural Lecture
Professor Andy Brown - Inaugural Lecture
An English and Creative Writing lecture | |
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Date | 28 May 2025 |
Time | 16:00 to 17:00 |
Place | Queens Building LT1 |
Provider | English and Creative Writing |
Organizer | Ed Whiteoak |
Event details
Abstract
In this illustrated talk, Professor Andy Brown will attempt to make a little sense of his varied research and writing, and his publications, over the last ten years. From poems concerning water quality, disease, and the Exeter cholera outbreak of 1832; to a neo-Victorian novel concerning Victorian sewers; a sequel novel set along the Victorian commodity frontier of the global guano trade, and a new book of poems about horses (and the copious dung they produce), Andy Brown will explore the Fecopoetic themes that tie each of these creative works together. Allied to these creative explorations, Andy will also discuss the contexts of his nascent book of critical essays on the poetry of water, waste and contamination: What Rhymes With Sewage? and will look prospectively towards a future project that places some of these concerns with waste and water into the frame of Mycopoetics: the poetry of fungi, decay and symbiosis. As a writer’s projects emerge, it often feels like they make little coherent sense at all. Retrospectively, however, since his original training as an ecologist and his subsequent work in Ecopoetics, it transpires that the emerging framework of Fecopoetics might help make some sense of the nebulous thing Andy Brown calls ‘his career’.
ANDY BROWN is Professor of Creative & Critical Writing at Exeter University. In the summer of 2025 his 16th collection of lyric poetry, THE BIG RIP, is published by the Worple Press. Other recent poetry books include Baikal Zen (Muscaliet Press, 2021), Casket (Shearsman, 2019), Bloodlines (Worple Press, 2018), Watersong (Shearsman, 2015), and Exurbia (Worple Press, 2014). He recently collaborated with Marc Woodward on a collection of original poems about music, Grace Notes (Sea Crow Press, USA, 2023), and a further collection with Marc Woodward on the archaeology and ecology of the River Teign, The Tin Lodes (Indigo Dreams, 2020). His previous books include The Fool and the Physician (2012), Goose Music (with John Burnside, 2008), and Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996-2006 (2006), all with Salt Publishing.
He co-edited the major anthology, A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine (Bloomsbury, with Corinna Wagner, 2016) and edited The Writing Occurs As Song: a Kelvin Corcoran Reader (Shearsman, 2015). He also recently saw published his monograph study of literary and artistic tree climbers, The Tree Climbing Cure (Bloomsbury, 2023). In 2024, Sea Crow Press published his second novel, The Midnight Mechanic, a neo-Victorian tale of water and waste, following his first, Apples & Prayers (Dean Street, 2015), a story of Tudor rebellion. The sequel novel to The Midnight Mechanic, provisionally titled White Gold, is in preparation now.
Before he came to Exeter University, Andy was a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation’s residential creative writing centre, Totleigh Barton, in Devon. He is a prolific singer-songwriter and performer with The Andy Brown Outfit, and The Escapees/SKPs, performing on the SW music scene. He originally trained as an ecologist, a discipline that has always informed his writing and research, and upon which his love of the natural world is grounded. He works here at Exeter University, where he established the Creative Writing Programme in 2001 with Professor Helen Taylor, and lives in Devon, which has been his home for the past 30 years. He spends as much writing time as he can – and that academic breaks allow – in his other home in rural Morbihan, Brittany. He lives with his wife, Natasha, and their horses, and has two grown children, and two stepsons.
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Location:
Queens Building LT1