St Hilda's College
- Date
- 14 June 2025 / 2-5pm
- Venue
- Riverside Pavilion and Terrace
- Attendees
- All welcome
'Grounding nature writing in scientific research, ecological commitment and direct, sustained experience of the natural object will provide the basis for writing about nature that will have scientific as well as literary credibility, potentially making an informed contribution to debate about ecological and human crises of the Anthropocene.' Steve Ely
Two eminent, award-winning poets, David Morley and Steve Ely, will read from their work and be in conversation about writing in the face of the climate emergency. Both passionate ecologists whose writing practice is grounded in scientific research and profound knowledge of the natural environment, they will be speaking of the power of well-wrought words to galvanise awareness of the nature around us, to help us, in Steve Ely’s words, to ‘re-discover the wellsprings’.
The event will include a discussion by David and Steve of poetry work in progress contributed by local poets on ecological and scientific themes.
Hosted by Sarah Watkinson, poet and Emeritus Fellow in Biology, and Georgina Paul, Fellow and Tutor in German.
All are welcome. The event is free but registration is required.
Professor David Morley FRSL, National Teaching Fellow, University of Warwick Writing Programme, is the author of multiple collections, including Scientific Papers (2002), The Invisible Kings (2007), Enchantment (2010), The Gypsy and the Poet (2013), The Magic of What's There (2017), FURY (2020), and most recently Passion (2025), published by Carcanet Press. He has received a number of literary awards including the 2015 Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry, a Cholmondeley Award, a major Eric Gregory Award, the Tyrone Guthrie Award, a Hawthornden International Writers Fellowship, an Arts Council Writers Award, the Raymond Williams Prize, and an Arts Council Fellowship in Writing at Warwick University.
Dr Steve Ely, Reader in Creative Writing, University of Huddersfield, hailed by Poetry International as ‘one of the most exhilarating poets currently working in the UK’, is the author of Oswald’s Book of Hours (Smokestack Books, 2013), Englaland (Smokestack Books, 2015), Lectio Violant (Shearsman Books, 2021), The European Eel (Longbarrow Press, 2021), Lives of British Shrews (Broken Sleep Book, 2023), and Eely (Longbarrow Press, 2024). He is editor of a visionary collection entitled Apocalyptic Landscape: Poems from the Expressionist Poetry Workshop (Valley Press, 2024) and has also published on Ted Hughes, including Ted Hughes’ South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
