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Professor Jem Poster

Professor and Director of Creative Writing
BA, MA (Cantab) PhD (Nottingham)

Contact

Email: ppp@aber.ac.uk
Office: D68
Phone: +44 (0)1970 621578

Teaching Areas

Jem Poster joined Aberystwyth University from Oxford University in 2003, taking up the newly created Chair of Creative Writing. His teaching at Oxford had initially focused primarily on twentieth-century literature, with a particular emphasis on literary modernism; but in 1998 he established Oxford's first award-bearing creative writing programme, the Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing, and much of his teaching from 1998 to 2003 was carried out in connection with that programme. He now directs Aberystwyth's extensive creative writing programme, on which he teaches a range of undergraduate and MA modules, as well as supervising the work of a substantial proportion of the department's creative writing PhD students.

Additional Interests

He is currently Chair of the editorial board of Wales’s premier literary periodical, New Welsh Review, and is academic adviser to the Sunday Times-Oxford Literary Festival. He has reviewed extensively for both The Guardian and The Australian.

Research

Jem Poster's PhD thesis, 'Poetry in an Age of Anxiety', examined the poetry of the 1930s: his 1993 survey, The Thirties Poets, drew largely on  research carried out in connection with the thesis. He has written on the poetry of Edward Thomas, and is currently editing one of the volumes of the six-volume Collected Prose of Edward Thomas, to be published by the Oxford University Press.

As a writer of fiction, he addresses a wide range of research topics: areas of particular relevance and interest include archaeology (he is a former archaeologist), architectural history, ornithology, psychology, environmentalism and World War Two London.

Staff Publications

Jem Poster is the author of two highly acclaimed novels, Courting Shadows (Sceptre, 2002) and Rifling Paradise (Sceptre, 2006). Courting Shadows has been published in translation in Spain, Germany and Poland, and was published in the US by Overlook Press in 2008. Rifling Paradise has appeared in German translation, with Spanish and Polish translations forthcoming; US publication is scheduled for 2009. Of Courting Shadows, Julie Myerson wrote in The Guardian that it is ‘as intelligent, daring and profound as it is highly, bewitchingly readable … a fantastically tightly written, read-every-word novel’. Rifling Paradise was described in the Times Literary Supplement as ‘immediately gripping … an epic tale whose figures in a landscape encapsulate a turning point in history’.

He has won first prize in both the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Peterloo Poets Open Poetry Competition; his poetry collection, Brought to Light, was published by Bloodaxe in 2001. Other book-length publications include George Crabbe: Selected Poetry (Carcanet, 1986) and The Thirties Poets (Open University Press, 1993).