'Creative Writing: Pollination and Transformation' - the inaugural lecture from Professor Abi Curtis

Professor Abi Curtis will deliver her inaugural lecture on Thursday 24 January 2019 in the De Grey Lecture Theatre at York St John University. Abi will talk about, and read from, her poetry and fiction; narrating her inspirations and considering how creative writing offers the possibility of approaching the world through non-human perspectives.

Abi will particularly draw on her cross-disciplinary Pollination Project work with bees as an inspiration for the creative arts. She will consider the ways in which creative writing can respond to the issue of human responsibility towards climate change and the eco-system. 

Abi is Professor of Creative Writing at York St John University. She has won an Eric Gregory Award and Somerset Maugham Award for her poetry collections, The Glass Delusion (Salt, 2013) and Unexpected Weather (Salt, 2009). Abi has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing, she joined York St John in 2010 and was Subject Director for Creative Writing until 2017, now co-ordinating the MA and MFA programmes.

Her work often engages with other disciplines, such as visual art, science and history: she has worked with the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum and had poetry set to music by composers, including Dr David Lancaster at York St John. Her writing explores such topics as mushrooms in Freud; the power of the squid in literature; the relationship between poetry and ventriloquism; climate change; ‘speculative elegy’, and pollination.

Abi's most recent work for broadcast has been a piece on the eye, commissioned by the BBC for Radio 3. She has also written on the role of the unconscious in the teaching of creative writing. Water & Glass, her first novel, a post-flood speculative narrative, is published by Cloud Lodge Books. 

For more about Abi and her works, explore her author website.

"Creative Writing: Pollination and Transformation": the inaugural lecture from Professor Abi Curtis promises to be a fascinating and thought provoking event. It's free and open to all ages.