Dr Yvonne Reddick

Reddick is the recipient of a Leadership Fellowship grant (2020-22) from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For this, she writes, analyses, edits and publishes poetry responding to the Anthropocene (a proposed geological epoch shaped by human actions). Her latest academic book project focuses on how modern and contemporary poets engage with place, scale and global environmental issues in the Anthropocene. The project analyses work by Seamus Heaney, Alice Oswald, Ted Hughes, Pascale Petit, Kei Miller, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and emerging writers.

Her own writing for this project creates new methods for presenting the global oil industry and its role in climate change. A British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant (2020-21) expands the ambitions of Reddick’s research on Seamus Heaney’s environmental writing.

In the Anthropocene Issue of Magma poetry journal, Reddick and her colleagues are publishing over 80 poets from the USA, Europe, the Caribbean and India, aiming to benefit the careers of emerging poets and to bring the work of established poets to new readers. The Anthropocene Issue will be used as a resource at environmental writing workshops.

Reddick’s impact case study for REF 2021 focused on helping bereaved people to write poetry, expressing their emotions and achieving creative benefits. Stakeholders in the Writing for Wellbeing: Poetry, Grief and Healing project include the NHS Lancashire Recovery College, St Catherine’s Hospice, the Harris Museum, Gallery and Library, Poetry in Aldeburgh festival and Magma poetry journal. A poem from Magma that Reddick commissioned, published and submitted to the Forward Prizes, Malika Booker’s ‘The Little Miracles,’ won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2020. Further recipients of writing workshops and workshop materials include the Arvon Foundation, hospices and bereavement charities. This research draws on the elegies for Reddick’s father in her award-winning pamphlet Translating Mountains.

Reddick lectures on modules that deploy her research expertise in contemporary poetry, environmental writing, modern and contemporary literature and world literatures. Many of her current and former students are now successful poets.

Reddick began her career with an Early Career Fellowship at the University of Warwick. There, she founded an interdisciplinary, international Environmental Studies Research Network with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. For her poetry, Reddick has received a Northern Writer’s Award (2016), the Mslexia magazine women’s poetry pamphlet prize (2017), a Hawthornden Fellowship (2017), a commendation in the National Poetry Competition, the Poetry Society’s inaugural Peggy Poole Award, a Creative Futures Literary Award (2018) and first prize in Ambit journal’s poetry competition (2019). Her writing engages with climate change, the petroleum industry, extinction, elegy and environmental resilience. Her third pamphlet, Translating Mountains (Seren 2017) was selected as a favourite pamphlet of the year in the Times Literary Supplement. Her poetry pamphlet Spikenard (Smith/Doorstop 2019) was selected for publication by former Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Spikenard was picked as one of the best pamphlets of early 2019 in the London Review of Books. Reddick’s work appears in newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian Review, The New Statesman, Poetry Review and Poetry Ireland Review. Her nature writing articles appear in journals including Ambit and The Clearing. Her poetry has been translated into Greek, Swedish, French, Chinese, Hungarian, German and Italian. She is an editor at the poetry journal Magma.