
Dr Yvonne Reddick
Research Fellow in Modern English and World Literatures, AHRC Leadership Fellow
School of Humanities, Language & Global Studies
Yvonne Reddick’s research focuses on environmental poetry, nature writing, and most recently, culture and climate change. Her book on Ted Hughes’s environmentalism was described as ‘immensely readable’ in the Times Literary Supplement, showing, ‘through fresh readings of the poems, the significance of environmentalism for much of Hughes’s work’. Her latest book project focuses on poetry and the concept of the Anthropocene. She is an award-winning poet, editor and nonfiction writer, widely published in newspapers and magazines.
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.
- Ph.D. English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, 2013
- M.A. English and Related Literature, University of York, 2010
- B.A. English Literature, University of Cambridge, 2008
- Northern Writer’s Award (2016)
- Mslexia Pamphlet Prize (2017)
- Jerwood/Arvon mentee (2017-18). Mentor: Pascale Petit
- Hawthornden Fellowship (2017)
- Commendation – National Poetry Competition (2018)
- Peggy Poole Award (2018). Mentor: Professor Deryn Rees-Jones
- First prize in Ambit poetry journal’s poetry competition (2019)
- John Muir Trust Des Rubens/Bill Wallace award for nature writing (2020)
- Environmental humanities
- contemporary poetry
- ecopoetry
- nature writing
- postcolonial ecocriticism
- Founder of EPSRC and IAS-funded Environmental Studies Research Network
- Member of the Association for the Study of literature and the Environment (ASLE UK-I)
- Peer reviewer for Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (Oxford University Press)
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Reddick is a member of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research, and her articles on postcolonial ecocriticism appear in high-quality journals such as Wasafiri, ISLE and Tydskrif vir Letterkunde. She received a Guest Research Fellowship at Linnaeus University, Sweden, to pursue this research in 2016, and a Harry-Ransom Center Fellowship grant in 2017. Reddick’s impact case study for REF 2021 focuses 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. 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, and the edited poetry journal Magma issue 75, on the theme of loss. For this issue of Magma, Reddick led an interdisciplinary research collaboration between poets, psychologists and counsellors, resulting in the creation of new commissioned poems for the issue. This research was funded by the Arts Council England. With artist Diana Zwibach, Reddick co-curates the art and poetry exhibition Deerhart, which has toured to galleries in Cambridge, Preston and Edinburgh. Reddick supervises PhD projects on the comparative analysis of nonfiction, and on climate change arts. She supervises MA by Research projects on environmental poetry. She welcomes enquiries about PhD and MA by Research supervision on topics including: modern and contemporary British and Irish poetry, Creative Writing (especially poetry and life-writing), ecocriticism, elegy, the ‘new nature-writing’ and Anthropocene studies.
Use the links below to view their profiles:
- View their unique and persistent identifier on the ORCiD registry
- Full list of publications and articles on CLoK
- Centre for Sustainable Transitions
- Institute for Black Atlantic Research
- Centre for Migration, Diaspora and Exile
- Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet
- Burning Season (poetry, climate change, oil industry)
- Anthropocene Poetry
- 2020-22: Leadership Fellowship, Arts and Humanities Research Council
- 2020-21: British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant
- 2019-20: Arts Council England Project Grant
- 2017: Harry-Ransom Center Fellowship
- 2013: EPSRC-funded environmental Studies Research Network
- Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies Conference, 2021
- The Anthropocene and Race Conference. Lead organiser with Ti-Han Chang, 2020
- Institute for Black Atlantic Research conference, 2016
- Approaches to Sustainability EPSRC network conference, 2013
Telephone:+44 (0)1772 896423
Email: Email:Dr Yvonne Reddick
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