Dr Jacqueline Yallop
Lecturer
MA (Oxon) PhD (Sheffield)
Contact
Email: jay4@aber.ac.uk
Office: D68
Phone: +44 (0) 1970 621538
Teaching Areas
Jacqueline Yallop is the prose specialist on the creative writing teaching team. She is currently co-ordinating the Ways with Words core module for first years, which introduces a range of different genres, techniques and approaches, and she works with third-year students on the Writing and Place option module. At MA level, she is teaching research skills and leading seminars on writing fiction. Her PhD students are writing novels exploring ideas around boundaries and identity, featuring a range of settings from Paris to China.
Research
Jacqueline is the author of two novels, Kissing Alice (Atlantic Books: 2010), shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize, and Obedience (Atlantic Books: 2011), nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Her novels have been translated into several languages and are published in the US by Penguin books. She also writes creative non-fiction, and has published Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World (Atlantic Books: 2011), which was shortlisted for the Longman-History Today Book of the Year 2012. She is researching the decline of the English country house and the evolution of estate ‘model’ villages for both a new novel, and her next work of non-fiction. In general her research interests include nineteenth-century history and fiction, genre fiction (particularly the period crime novel) and interdisciplinary approaches to texts, art objects and display.
Additional Interests
Jacqueline curates exhibitions, and is working on a triennial of major shows exploring the legacy of John Ruskin’s thought on contemporary art and society. She is a Director of the Guild of St George, an organisation which was established by Ruskin in 1871 and which continues to promote active, practical and inclusive projects in education, environment and culture.
Staff Publications
Kissing Alice (Atlantic Books, 2010).
'Kissing Alice is a very fine debut, beautifully written and with the emotions subtly rendered.' Edna O'Brien
'Yallop's 1920s and 1930s have an authentically grainy feel...she does not feel the need to spell our every emotion or explain each ambiguity. This makes Kissing Alice a very plausible portrait of messy sibling love.' The Financial Times.
'Yallop has a beady eye for period detail and a wise understanding of psychology.' The Daily Mail.
Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (Atlantic Books, 2011)
“Brilliant and original”, The Daily Express
“With wit and well-informed relish Yallop explores the complex psychology of collecting”, The Times
“A tremendous book, brimming over with strange, compelling images and glittering morsels to tempt the magpie reader. This really is a cabinet of curiosities, , delights and revelations”, Alexandra Harris, The Sunday Times.
“She is interested in the psychology of individual collectors – what tips a man or woman over into ferocious acquisitiveness, into seeking particular things across continents. She is interested in the competitiveness of collectors, their desire to have the first or the best example of something. She is interested in collaboration...and in stealth and warfare and stealing marches.” A.S. Byatt, The Guardian.
“A gem of art and social history”, The Scotsman.
Obedience (Atlantic Books, 2011)
“Obedience should have been on the Booker shortlist: seriously intelligent (and serious), steeped in ambiguities and hugely readable. Can a novel do or be more?” Julie Myerson, New Statesman, ‘Books of the Year’
“Obedience is an original novel, quietly written but intensely imagined, about one of the defining questions of the century just past: where and how we choose to draw the line between innocence and guilt, ignorance and complicity...it’s rare to find a book that is seemingly so simple, but is really ambiguous and thought-provoking.” Hilary Mantel, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall.
“Obedience begins as a novel of slow intense observation and opens out into a novel of huge scope and profound questioning…Yallop leaves unmarked the line between what is ordinary and what is significant, or even sublime…This is a novel about forms of guilt and complicity, the uses of humility and humiliation, and the sadness of missed opportunities.” Alexandra Harris, The Sunday Times
‘“A work of great originality, devastating in its impact… Yallop is a writer of rare fine judgment and delicacy… As powerful as it is subtle, a novel of gripping emotional and psychological intensity.” Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail
“[A] spellbinding tale of betrayal and illicit desire…it is the human experience of love, desire, guilt and loneliness that are at the heart of the novel. Yallop writes with real flair about these emotions, and it is some measure of her skill that she turns a nun’s failed hopes into a compelling and quietly devastating story about a woman destroyed by her faith.” The Independent
Marlford (Atlantic Books, forthcoming)
Dreamstreets: Radical Towns (Cape; forthcoming)