Dr Matthew Francis

Reader in Creative Writing
BA, MA (Cantab) PhD (Southampton) Photograph of Dr Matthew Francis.

Contact

Email: mwf@aber.ac.uk
Office: D65
Phone: +44 (0)1970 622469

Profile

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Teaching Areas

Creative writing at undergraduate, MA and PhD level.

Research

Best-known as a poet, Matthew is also a novelist, short story writer and critic, with an interest in twentieth-century and contemporary poetry and fiction, and in particular the twentieth-century Scottish poet W.S. Graham.

Staff Publications

Matthew's most recent publication, Mandeville (Faber, 2008), a collection of poems inspired by the medieval travel-writer Sir John Mandeville, received outstanding reviews. The Observer described it as "Mesmerising... packed with wonderfully vivid and elaborate descriptions, sometimes reminiscent of Byron, sometimes of Borges, of fabulous beasts and landscapes and great Eastern warlords and potentates... an extraordinary achievement." The Sunday Times praised its “grandeur and strangeness”, while The Guardian reviewer wrote that “this fascinating, beautiful collection marks him out once more as one of our most skilled, intriguing and consistently ambitious poets.”

His other collections of poetry are:

Whereabouts (rufus books, 2005) – “Superb” (The Guardian)
Dragons (Faber, 2001) – shortlisted for the Forward Prize and The Welsh Book of the Year Award
Blizzard (Faber, 1996) – shortlisted for the Forward Prize and winner of the Southern Arts Prize

He is also the author of a critical study: Where the People Are: Language and Community in the Poetry of W.S. Graham (Salt, 2004) and a novel WHOM (Bloomsbury, 1989), and editor of W.S. Graham’s New Collected Poems (Faber, 2004). His collection of stories Singing a Man to Death will be published by Cinnamon in April 2012. He is currently working on a novel set in Wales and London in the seventeenth century, as well as a new collection of poems.