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Rory Waterman

Rory Waterman

Associate Professor

School of Arts & Humanities

Staff Group(s)
English, Culture and Media

Role

Dr Waterman is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Modern & Contemporary Literature, and has been at NTU since 2012. He lectures on the BA Creative Writing, BA English, the MA Creative Writing, and supervises PhD students working in and on modern and contemporary literature and/or creative writing. Since 2013, he has also led the highly successful NTU MA in Creative Writing. From February 2024 to July 2025, he will be leading the AHRC Research Development and Engagement project 'Lincolnshire Folk Tales: Origins, Legacies, Connections, Futures'. He is a prominent press critic and commentator, and is the author of three acclaimed collections of poetry with Carcanet Press and three critical monographs, and the editor of several edited volumes and anthologies (details below), and he founded and co-edits the poetry publisher New Walk Editions. He established and convenes the Nottingham Creative Writing Hub at NTU, and is an active member of the Centre for Research in Literature, Linguistics and Culture.

Career overview

  • Associate Lecturer, University of Leicester, (2010-12)
  • PhD (University of Leicester, 2008-12)
  • MA (Durham University, 2005-6)
  • BA  (University of Leicester, 2002-5)

Research areas

Dr Waterman is a widely-published poet and critic. His three full-length poetry collections are: Tonight the Summer's Over (Carcanet, 2013), Sarajevo Roses (Carcanet, 2017) and Sweet Nothings (Carcanet, 2020). A fourth, Come Here to This Gate, is forthcoming from Carcanet in 2024. His first was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award, and he was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize in 2019. He has also published three monographs on modern and contemporary poetry, a volume of essays on the life and work of the 'tramp-poet' W. H. Davies (1871-1940), and several other edited volumes and anthologies. In 2020-21, Dr Waterman co-led the AHRC-funded project 'Poets Respond to Covid-19', establishing partnerships with numerous arts organisations and UNESCO Cities of Literature. From 2024-25, he will lead the AHRC-funded project 'Lincolnshire Folk Tales: Origins, Legacies, Connections, Futures'. He also founded and co-edits the poetry publisher New Walk Editions, which has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards in two categories, and previously founded and edited New Walk magazine, an international magazine for poetry and the arts.

Doctoral projects he has supervised, in Creative Writing and English, across both, and in other areas of Humanities, include:

  • As Director of Studies: Eve Makis, ‘The Writer as Outsider: Writing Fiction Outside a Cultural Identity’
  • As Director of Studies: Steve Katon, ‘The Representation and Underrepresentation of Disabled Characters in Contemporary Middle-Grade Children's Literature’ (AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded) (ongoing)
  • As Director of Studies: Matt Biggs, ‘Opening the Mystery Box: Literary Puzzles in Contemporary Fiction’
  • As co-supervisor: Lucy Grace, ‘Stories in Stones: Mines, Memory and the Geological Imagination’ (AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded) (ongoing)
  • As Director of Studies: Rebecca Bruce, ‘Travels of the Ancient Egyptian Body: From the Tomb to the Museum’ (NTU Studentship-funded) (ongoing)
  • As Director of studies: Julie Gardner, ‘Fear and Hope in Contemporary British Women’s Poetry’ (ongoing)
  • As Director of Studies: Paul Adey, ‘“Nothing New Under the Sun”: Literary Allusion, Intertextuality and Lyrical Performative Quotation in Hip Hop Lyricism.’ (AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded) (2023)
  • As Director of Studies: Drew Collison, ‘Basil Bunting’s The Spoils and Its Legacy’ (2023)
  • As co-supervisor:  Panya Banjoko, ‘The Politics of Poetry in Nottingham and the Role of African-Caribbean Writers and Networks in the 1970s and 1980s’ (NTU Studentship-funded) (2022)
  • As Director of Studies: Tuesday Shannon, ‘Place Attachment and the Post-Industrial Landscape in the Poetry of Tony Harrison, Ian Parks and Helen Mort: A Critical and Creative Study’ (AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded) (2022)
  • As Director of Studies: Alyson Stoneman, ‘Contemporary Poetry, Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding’ (AHRC Midlands3Cities-funded) (2020)
  • As Director of Studies: Joanne Dixon, ‘Fitting Manifestations: Epiphany in Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie, Liz Berry and My Own Writing’ (AHRC Midlands3Cities-funded) (2018)
  • As co-supervisor: Rebecca Cullen, ‘Mastering Time: Temporality in Contemporary Anglophone Poetry’ (AHRC Midlands3Cities-funded) (2018)
  • As co-supervisor: Tony Robinson-Smith, ‘The Dragon Run, a Travel Memoir of Bhutan with Critical Commentary Examining Representation of the Self in Modern Travel Writing’ (2014)

Dr Waterman welcomes research proposals from prospective PhD students working in any of the following areas (among others):

  • creative writing, especially poetry and creative nonfiction
  • contemporary poetry
  • 20th and 21st-century literature
  • writing travel / memoir
  • class and modern/contemporary writing
  • writing and war/conflict
  • writing and censorship
  • poetic form and formal experimentation
  • poetry and travel
  • folklore and folk tales
  • writing from/about Lincolnshire, the Midlands, the North of England, or Northern Ireland

Dr Waterman is interested, and experienced, in supervising PhDs in Creative Writing, critical and creative writing, and English literature. Some of the recent and ongoing PhD projects he has supervised have focused on: post-industrial Northern landscapes and their impact on contemporary poetry; a contextualisation of Basil Bunting's The Spoils; the poetry of sea level change; archiving Nottingham's black heritage with a focus on poetry; 'mystery-box' fiction; hope and fear in contemporary women's writing; literary intertextuality and allusion in hip hop lyricism; epiphany in contemporary women's poetry; poetry and time. Several have included a substantial creative work, e.g. a collection of poems or a novel; others have been entirely critical in nature.

External activity

Recent external examining/consultation appointments (programmes):

External Consultant, Metropolitan College, Athens, MA Creative Writing, 2023
External Consultant, Edge Hill University, MA Creative Writing, 2023
External Examiner, Oxford Brookes University, MA Creative Writing, 2022-26
External Examiner, University of Surrey, MA English/MA Creative Writing, 2020-24
External Examiner, Leeds Beckett University, MA Creative Writing, 2018-22
External Examiner, University of Northampton, BA Creative Writing, 2014-18
External Examiner, University of Plymouth, MA Creative Writing, 2013-17

Dr Waterman has examined PhDs on a wide range of topics, in Creative Writing and English literature, at: University of Edinburgh; Durham University; Newcastle University (twice); Goldsmith's, University of London; University of Kent; Plymouth University, etc.

Publisher, New Walk magazine and New Walk Editions (2010-present)
Trustee, Poetry London Ltd (2023-present)
Writer in Residence, Bucheon, Republic of Korea (autumn 2020)
Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature Collaborative Board (2017-present)

Dr Waterman regularly gives readings, talks, lectures and workshops nationally and internationally, and regularly writes for many publications including the Times Literary Supplement and PN Review. His external author website is www.rorywaterman.com.

Other recent project partners have included:

  • Adverse Camber
  • Heritage Lincolnshire
  • Shearsman Books
  • Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature
  • Carcanet Press
  • Five Leaves Publications
  • Broadway Cinema
  • Mammoth Climate Action Cinema
  • Lincolnshire Life
  • Bucheon UNESCO City of Literature
  • Poetry London
  • Friends of Edward Thomas / Edward Thomas Study Centre
  • The Poetry Society

Publications

Books:

  • Come Here to This Gate, Waterman R., Carcanet Press, 2024 - poetry collection - forthcoming
  • Endless Present, Waterman R., Shoestring Press, 2024 - critical monograph - forthcoming
  • Essays on W. H. Davies. Waterman R (ed.), Anthem Press, 2021 - edited volume
  • Wendy Cope. Waterman R, Liverpool University Press, 2021 - critical monograph
  • Poetry and Covid-19: An Anthology of Contemporary International and Collaborative Poetry, Waterman R and Caleshu A (Shearsman Press, 2021) - poetry anthology
  • Sweet Nothings. Waterman R, Carcanet, 2020 - poetry collection
  • 25: Celebrating 25 Years of NTU's MA Creative Writing, Waterman, R. and Belbin, D. (eds), Shoestring Press, 2019 - anthology
  • Sarajevo Roses. Waterman R, Carcanet, 2017 (Shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize, 2019) - poetry collection
  • A.W.H Davies Reader. Waterman R (ed.), Carcanet, 2016 - edited volume
  • Poets of the Second World War. Waterman R, Northcote House/ Writers and Their Work, 2016 - critical monograph
  • Something Happens, Sometimes Here: Contemporary Lincolnshire Poetry. Waterman R (ed.), Five Leaves, 2015 - poetry anthology
  • Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley , Ashgate, 2014 - critical monograph
  • Tonight the Summer's Over. Waterman R, Carcanet, 2013 (Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize 2014) - poetry collection

Chapters and articles (select list):

  • 'Poetry and COVID-19: the benefit of poetry and the poetryandcovidarchive.com website to mental health and wellbeing', Caleshu, A., Waterman, R. and Kemp, S., Journal of Poetry Therapy, 2023.
  • 'Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, and Georgian Poetry'. Waterman R. Reading Walter de la Mare. LUP 2022
  • 'Getting Up-fucked: Charting Philip Larkin’s Legacy in Parodies and Para-poems'. Waterman R. Yearbook of English Studies 51, 2021.
  • '"The nation rejoices or mourns": Literary and Cultural Ambivalences in Wendy Cope's Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis'. Waterman R, English: The Journal of the English Association 262, 2019
  • '"Oh so Loinerly": Geographical Transitions and the Struggle to Belong in Tony Harrison's The Loiners'. Waterman R. British Literature in Transition 1960-1980, CUP, 2019
  • Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Waterman R. New Casebook on American Poetry Since 1945, Palgrave 2018
  • “Over Our Heads”: Charles Causley's "Loss of an Oil Tanker"'. Waterman R, 2013, The Explicator, 71.4
  • Becoming warm: matrimony and reticence in the poetry of R. S. Thomas. Waterman R, 2012. Bristol Journal of English Studies 1.

Dr Waterman has also published hundreds of reviews of contemporary poetry, memoir and criticism in the Times Literary Supplement, PN Review, Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

See all of Rory Waterman's publications...

Press expertise

Dr Waterman has spoken about creative writing, modern literature, publishing and poetry at various events and in the media (radio, print journalism, podcasts, etc). He would be especially happy to talk to the press about modern and contemporary poetry, writing, poetry reviewing, poetry/literary publishing, Lincolnshire folklore, or about his own writing/creative practice or critical research.