Visitors and Community
As a discipline, English is all about the connections between literature, writing, and the wider field of human experience. We welcome opportunities to discuss our work with anyone who feels interested, and members of the programme enjoy giving talks to local groups when invited.
Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing
This program allows us to offer a one-year position in the programme to a highly qualified New Zealand writer each year. The position is meant to encourage New Zealand writing by offering a writer a chance to work full-time in an academic setting. It also benefits communication between academic and creative writers, something that our programme greatly prizes. The Residency is supported by funding from Creative New Zealand.
- 1 February 2009 - 31 January 2010
Victor Rodger
Reading and Watching for Pleasure
Reading texts may be our job, but we do it for pleasure too! Here are some suggestions from a few members of staff.
Philip Armstrong
I enjoy novels in the genre of urban fantasy (sometimes called "steampunk"), for example those by China Mieville, Steph Swainston and Melvyn Burgess. I like reading young adult fiction, particularly the more imaginative kind, for example the work of Philip Pullman, Maurice Gee, Garth Nix and others. And I like (some) 'literary' writers who mix elements of the fantastic into their fiction -- for example Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Alasdair Gray, Peter Carey, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others. Also, because I don't teach or research it, I find it relaxing and pleasurable to read poetry, and especially 'nature' poetry -- or rather, poetry about the non-human world: William Blake and (some) other Romantics, Eleanor Wilner, Margaret Atwood, W.S. Merwin, Judith Wright.
Jeffrey Holman
I bore everyone with this: J.G. Sebald (anything, but The Emigrants is good to start with, or if feeling bold, Austerlitz). Sombre, dreamy expatriated German genius.
I've been watching Mad Men on Prime, just to remind myself what it was about the 1950s that fired me with a scrambled brain smack into the madness of the 1960s: war veteran fathers with PTSD, sexism and cigarettes, suburban neurosis and the Red Menace.