Lucy Newlyn

Lucy Newlyn was born in 1956 in Kampala, Uganda.[2] She grew up in Leeds, where she attended Bennett Road Primary School and Lawnswood High School, winning an open scholarship to read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1974.[3] She took up her Oxford place in 1975 and graduated with a Congratulatory First in 1978. Her D.Phil. thesis, supervised by Dr Roy Park, was later published as an Oxford English Monograph by Oxford University Press.[4] While working on her doctorate, she held a series of temporary lectureships in various Oxford colleges.[3] In 1984 (after a year as a lecturer at Christ Church) took up a Stipendiary Lectureship at St Edmund Hall.[5] Two years later, she was elected as the A.C. Cooper Fellow and Tutor in English there – a permanent post which she held in conjunction with a CUF Lecturership in the Oxford English Faculty.[6] Newlyn gained the title Professor of English Language and Literature in 2005.[5] She is Honorary Professor at the University of Aberystwyth,[3] an Advisory Editor of the journal Romanticism,[7] a Fellow of the English Association,[8] and a Patron of the Wordsworth Trust.[9] Following in Bernard O’Donoghue’s footsteps, she has been literary editor of The Oxford Magazine since 2011.[10] She was co-founder, with Stuart Estell, of the Hall Writers' Forum, an online resource launched in 2013 for the exchange of writing and discussion of literature and the arts.[11] In 2015, she led the campaign to elect Wole Soyinka as Oxford's next Professor of Poetry.[12] Married to the economist Martin Slater, Lucy Newlyn has two step children and one daughter.[13]

Lucy Newlyn's longstanding research interests are eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, especially poetry and non-fictional prose in the Romantic period; influences on Romanticism; the reception of Romanticism; creativity and multiple authorship; allusion and intertextuality; reader-response and reception theory.[14] She is an expert on Wordsworth and Coleridge,[14] and has published extensively in the field of English Romantic literature, including four books with Oxford University Press and the Cambridge Companion to Coleridge.[15][16] Her book Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize in 2001: 'a signal contribution to British Romantic studies and literary theory'.[14][17]

Newlyn’s more recent research has concerned peripatetic traditions in poetry and prose; nature writing and environmentalism; regional identity and the poetics of place; the theory and practice of life-writing.[14] Since 2003, she has been working on the prose of Edward Thomas.[14] Her edition of his book Oxford came out in 2005.[18] This was followed by several articles on Thomas, as well as Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry, co-edited with Guy Cuthbertson.[19] She is general co-editor of Edward Thomas, Selected Prose Writings, a six-volume edition for Oxford University Press.[20] Together, she and Cuthbertson have edited England and Wales and they are currently co-editing another volume, Pilgrimages.[20] Newlyn has never strayed very far from her first love, English Romanticism, and her most recent book, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other (2013) brings together many of her longstanding and recent research interests.[21]

As well as an academic, Newlyn is a published poet and anthologist. Her first collection, Ginnel (Oxford Poets/Carcanet, 2005) concerns her ‘intense local attachment’ to the streets and alleys of Headingley in Leeds, where she grew up.[22] The collection featured in Woman’s Hour on 1 December 2005,[23] and prompted four paintings by June Berry FRWS, shown in the Royal Watercolour Society’s ‘The Poet and the Painter’ exhibition at Bankside Gallery in November 2008.[24] ‘Baking’ was ‘Highly Commended’ by the judges of the Forward Prize and re-printed in The Forward Book of Poetry (Faber and Faber, 2005).[24] Poems from the collection have also appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Yorkshire Post, Oxford Today, The English Review, and The Oxford Magazine.[24][25] A recording of Ginnel, read by Sherry Baines, has been published as a ‘Daisy Book’ CD by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).[24]

Newlyn second collection, Earth's Almanac (Enitharmon Press, 2015) emerged over a fifteen-year period following the untimely death of her sister.[26] In this collection she adapts the form of the 'Shepherd's Calendar' to the phases of grief, condensing a long process of reflection and remembering into the passage of a single year.[26]

In addition to her own poetry, Newlyn has published several anthologies of poetry and coordinated a number of collaborative writing projects. Together with Jenny Lewis, she was awarded a grant from Oxford University’s Institute for the Advancement of University Learning in 2002 to undertake research based on workshops at St Edmund Hall.[27] Their findings (together with the students’ writing) were published in Synergies: Creative Writing in Academic Practice (2003; 2004).[28] Newlyn was poet-in-residence for The Guardian in November 2005.[29] She ran university workshops on ‘The Craft of Writing’ with Christopher Ricks during his tenure as Professor of Poetry; since 2001 she has run regular writing workshops for students at St Edmund Hall.[27]

Newlyn's personal experience of Bipolar Disorder is described in her fifteen-year memoir, Diary of a Bipolar Explorer, published by Signal Books in 2018.[30] The book combines poetry with prose, and seeks to de-stigmatise mental illness.[31]

• Newlyn, Lucy; Gravil, Richard; Roe, Nicholas, eds. (1985). Coleridge's Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521033992.
• Newlyn, Lucy (1986). Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion (2001 paperback ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199242597.
• Newlyn, Lucy (1993). "Paradise Lost" and the Romantic Reader (2001 paperback ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199242580.
• Newlyn, Lucy (2000). Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception. Winner of the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay prize, 2001 (2003 paperback ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198187110.
• Newlyn, Lucy, ed. (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521659093.
• Newlyn, Lucy; Lewis, Jenny, eds. (2002). Synergies: Creative Writing in Academic Practice. 1. Oxford: Holywell Press. ISBN 9780954508401.
• Newlyn, Lucy; Lewis, Jenny, eds. (2004). Synergies: Creative Writing in Academic Practice. 2. Oxford: Holywell Press. ISBN 9780954508401.
• Newlyn, Lucy (2005). Ginnel. Oxford Poets. Carcanet. ISBN 9781903039748.
• Newlyn, Lucy, ed. (2005). Chatter of Choughs: An Anthology Celebrating the Return of Cornwall's Legendary Bird. Penzance: Hypatia Trust. ISBN 9781872229492.
• Newlyn, Lucy, ed. (2005). Edward Thomas: Oxford. Signal Books. ISBN 1902669851.
• Newlyn, Lucy; Cuthbertson, Guy, eds. (2007). Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry. Enitharmon. ISBN 9781904634355.
• Newlyn, Lucy; Cuthbertson, Guy, eds. (2011). Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition, England and Wales. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199558261.
• Newlyn, Lucy (2013). William and Dorothy Wordsworth: 'All in Each Other'. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199696390.
• Newlyn, Lucy (2015). Earth’s Almanac. Enitharmon. ISBN 9781910392102.
• Newlyn, Lucy (9 July 2015). "Selecting Oxford's professor of poetry should not be trial by media". Times Higher Education.
• Newlyn, Lucy, ed. (2016). Dorothy Wordsworth: The Grasmere Journal. The Folio Society.
• Newlyn, Lucy; Agyeman-Duah, Ivor, eds. (2016). May Their Shadows Never Shrink: Wole Soyinka and the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke. ISBN 9780992843670.
• Newlyn, Lucy (2018). Diary of a Bipolar Explorer. Oxford: Signal Books. ISBN 9781909930636.