Our Writers

Hannah Greenstreet

Hannah Greenstreet is Lecturer in Creative Writing: Stage and Screen. She is a playwright, and theatre critic and her academic research and creative practice centres around the relationship between theatrical form and politics. Her DPhil thesis on ‘Experiments with Realism in Contemporary Feminist Theatre in Britain’ won the Swapna Dev Memorial Prize at the University of Oxford in 2021.

Hannah’s queer reimagining of Euripides’ fragmentary tragedy Andromeda, co-created with director Charlotte Vickers, was staged at Camden People’s Theatre in July 2021 with funding from Arts Council England. In 2019-20, Hannah was a SPARK Supported Artist with Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, and was commissioned to write a show for their young company. She has developed her playwriting with Spread the Word, Soho Writers’ Lab, the North Wall Arts Centre and Menagerie Theatre Company. Hannah also regularly reviews theatre for The Stage and Exeunt Magazine, where she has been Reviews Co-Editor since 2018.

David Hering (Co-Director)

David Hering writes and researches on form and aesthetics in the contemporary novel, contemporary literary/theoretical depictions of the spectral, literature and cinema, and literature and popular music. He leads Illustrating Futures, a collaboration with Comics Youth and Tate, which addresses the use of comics and graphic novels in the treatment of mental health in young people. He is author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (2016) and was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin, for the purposes of researching Wallace's archive. He is currently working on a new book about haunting, objects, affect and time, and co-editing (with Sarah Osment) a collection of essays on the poet and musician David Berman for Contemporaries at Post45. His novel Zealandia was shortlisted for the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and the 2020 Northern Book Prize.

His writing has appeared in, among other publications, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Quietus, Critical Engagements and 3:AM Magazine. He has been invited to speak about his research at institutions including New York University, The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Trinity College Dublin, University of York and University of Birmingham. He is also a regular attendee of the UK meetings of the Post45 group.

Lucienne Loh

Lucienne Loh is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English. She works primarily in the areas of postcolonial literature and theory, particularly in the British context. She is interested in the intersection between literature and politics, especially around theories of racism, contemporary globalisation and transnationalism, all as legacies of the British empire. She is the author of The Postcolonial Country in Contemporary Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). With Alex Tickell at the Open University, she co-directs the British Chinese Studies Network. She is currently exploring new methodologies bringing literary analysis to bear on British Chinese oral history and narratives and works broadly on British Chinese writing in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her current monograph project examines the relationship between slave narratives written during the long eighteenth-century and contemporary Black British writing. With CNIW, she has chaired a number of events involving British Chinese and Chinese writers.

Sandeep Parmar (Co-Director)

Sandeep Parmar FRSL FRSA is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She holds a PhD from University College London and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her research interests are primarily modernist women’s writing and contemporary poetry and race. Her books include: Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman, scholarly editions for Carcanet Press of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees and The Collected Poems of Nancy Cunard as well as two books of her own poetry: The Marble Orchard and Eidolon, winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Statesman, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker and Co-Director of Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing. In 2017, she co-founded the Ledbury Poetry Critics Scheme for poetry reviewers of colour.

Deryn Rees-Jones (Co-Director)

Deryn Rees-Jones is a poet, editor and critic. She has published five full-length collections of poetry, most recently ‘Erato’ (2019) and ‘Burying the Wren’ (2014) (both books were Poetry Book Society Recommendations and were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Roland Mathias prizes). Her Selected Poems, ‘What It’s Like To Be Alive’ was published in 2016 and was a PBS Special Commendation. Deryn has collaborated with several visual artists on projects, including the AHRC funded Poetry Beyond Text, the Poetry Society’s touring exhibition of women’s poetry and landscape Where We Begin to Look, and most recently, a commission by the Ledbury Festival based on the life of the memoirist Helen Thomas which resulted in a book and filmpoem, with the artist Charlotte Hodes, ‘And You, Helen’ . Their exhibition ‘The Errant Muse’ can be viewed here https://charlottehodes.com/downloads/errant.pdf

Critical work on women’s poetry can be found in ‘Consorting with Angels’ (2005) and the accompanying anthology ‘Modern Women Poets’ (2005). Most recently Deryn has focussed her interest in women’s poetry through a series of essay on trauma, repetition and music in the work of the poet Elizabeth Bishop. She has recently completed a monograph on the Portuguese artist Paula Rego, ‘The Art of Story’ (2019) which explores the relationship in her work between narrative and image. She works regularly with the Liverpool Arab Arts festival on collaborative projects between Yemeni writers and artists. She is the editor of the award winning Pavilion Poetry, an imprint of Liverpool University Press.

Will Slocombe

Will Slocombe primarily works on the critical side of the literary divide, but has interests in various aspects of creative writing such as metafictions, experimental poetry and prose, the impact of new media technologies, and sf, as well as in the interface between creative and critical writing. He has supervised postgraduate work in the areas of digital poetry and information, and metafictions, alongside publishing his own work in outlets such as The Interpreter's House, Poetry Wales, Envoi, and 3:AM Magazine, and in various anthologies. He is particularly interested in the ways in which states of mind can be represented textually, and more broadly in the links between writing and mental health; his current creative projects are concerned with the relationship between biography, diagnosis, and textual form.

Sam Solnick

Sam Solnick's primary research interests are contemporary literature and the environmental humanities. He is a contributing editor for the quarterly arts journal The White Review and his work has been featured in a variety of arts and media outlets including The Independent, Art Agenda, The Times Literary Supplement, RA Magazine, Newsweek and the BBC. Current projects and interests include: the aesthetics of climate change across literature, performance and visual culture; energy humanities (particularly ‘petro-culture’); Liverpool in Literature; sweetness; apocalypse; and the intersections of health and ecology. He is the Environmental Humanities co-lead for the University's Centre of Health, Medical and Environmental Humanities and co-director of the Literature and Science Hub.

Daniel O'Connor

Daniel O'Connor is the Colm Tóibín Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool. His debut novel, Nothing (2020), was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. His current creative interests are on Northern identity in relation to movement, class, masculinity and ideas of home. He is currently writing about these issues in relation to the North-East of England. His critical research focuses on twentieth-century literature and includes his monograph, Ted Hughes and Trauma (Palgrave, 2016).

Sophie Oliver

Sophie Oliver works on modernist writing by women. Her interests lie in the relationships between literature and visual cultures, especially art and fashion; feminism and modernism; the afterlives of modernist writing in contemporary culture; and ways of narrating intellectual history. She has published on Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and on Jean Rhys, who was also the subject of an exhibition she curated at the British Library in 2016, ‘Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea and the Making of an Author’. She is working on her first book, on modernist women and clothes, and starting to think about her next project, a new history of feminist readers and reading. Sophie is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and she writes about art and literature for newspapers and magazines including the TLS and The White Review.

Julian Ferraro

Julian Ferraro is a Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English. Current projects include work on contemporary pictorial narrative and the intersection between literature, architecture, and nostalgia – in particular the comics of the Canadian writers and artists Seth and Dean Motter. He is collaborating with Liverpool University’s Victoria Gallery and Museum on a retrospective exhibition covering the career of Liverpool-born artist John Higgins – perhaps best known as the colourist of the ground-breaking comic Watchmen. He has reviewed new and international writing for the TLS and Sunday Telegraph and supervises doctoral projects on the construction of city-space in the work of contemporary British and American writers, cartoonists, and film-makers, including Iain Sinclair, Will Self, Andrew Kötting, Lee Rourke, Geoff Nicholson, Tom McCarthy, John Lanchester, Teju Cole, Michael Sorkin, Colson Whitehead, and Ben Katchor.

Vid Simoniti

Vid Simoniti is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, where he also runs MA Art, Philosophy and Cultural Institutions. His research focuses on the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Recent publications include a contribution to Adrian Piper: A Reader (Museum of Modern Art, New York), "Living Images in Bio-Art" (Oxford Art Journal) and "Assessing Socially Engaged Art" (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism). Before joining Liverpool in 2018, he was a research fellow and lecturer in History of Art at the University of Cambridge, and he obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford. In collaboration with the Liverpool Biennial, Vid has recently recorded the podcast series “Art Against the World” (April 2021). He writes art and book reviews, and has curated several exhibitions (e.g. at the Ashmolean Museum, the National Gallery of Namibia).