Dr Yvonne Reddick

Yvonne Reddick is Research Lead for English Literature and Creative Writing. Her literary critical research focuses on authors' environmental awareness and activism, from Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney to Ken Saro-Wiwa and Karen McCarthy Woolf. She has been the recipient of a Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and grants from the British Academy, Arts Council and EPSRC. Her creative work spans poetry, nature writing, narrative nonfiction and documentary script writing. Recent impact work focuses on editing an Anthropocene Issue of Magma poetry journal, in collaboration with authors, oil industry geologists and environmental scientists; and helping schoolchildren to write climate change letters.

Yvonne Reddick's recent projects focus on climate change, the role the oil industry plays in it, and its impacts, especially on mountains and mountain animals. This work combines creative and critical methods. Outputs include the poetry collection Burning Season (Bloodaxe 2023); the film Searching for Snow Hares (2023), a collaboration with the filmmaker Aleksander Domanski; and Fire on Winter Hill (in progress), a memoir of mountain journeys with her petroleum engineer father. The manuscript is being developed with the aid of a Northern Debut Award from New Writing North.

Yvonne's AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2020-22) involved writing, analysing and publishing poetry responding to the Anthropocene (a proposed geological epoch shaped by human actions). Her book Anthropocene Poetry focuses on how poets including Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Kei Miller and Pascale Petit engage with the idea of the Anthropocene and environmental issues. A British Academy/Leverhulme Trust grant expanded the ambitions of her work on Heaney's support for conservation.

Yvonne's impact case study for REF 2027 focuses on literature's role in addressing environmental issues, aiming to forge new international, interdisciplinary, and educational connections. In the Anthropocene Issue of Magma poetry journal, Reddick and her colleagues published 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 was developed in collaboration with petroleum geologists and environmental scientists, aiming to progress poetry that links the oil economy to climate change. The issue is used as a resource at environmental writing workshops. Based on Reddick's work on the environmental letters of Hughes and Heaney, she has helped schoolchildren from Hungary to the UK to write climate change letters. She created a series of YouTube writing videos that were taken up by literary organisations nationally.

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.

Yvonne 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, Yvonne has received a Northern Writers' 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), first prize in Ambit journal's poetry competition (2019) and a prize in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry (2023). 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.

Yvonne's work appears in newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian Review, The New Statesman and Poetry Review. Her poetry has been translated into Greek, Swedish, French, Chinese, Hungarian, German and Italian.

Yvonne leads the module Literary Landscapes, on climate change writing, nature writing, ecopoetry, the oil industry, activists' writing, and the Anthropocene.