Preston researcher scoops nearly £100,000 for her climate change poetry project

Poets and geologists are merging their skills as part of a £100,000 initiative.
Dr Yvonne Reddick has won a grant of nearly 100k for a poetry projectDr Yvonne Reddick has won a grant of nearly 100k for a poetry project
Dr Yvonne Reddick has won a grant of nearly 100k for a poetry project

Poets will work with geologists and environmental scientists at a special workshop, looking at ancient fossils and handle oil-producing rocks, to transport their readers into ‘deep time’.

While a workshop with Ice Age animal bones and a ‘geopoetry’ hike up an extinct volcano, members of the public will be able to try their hands at writing Anthropocene poetry.

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This is all part of a new environmental poetry project being led by university researcher Dr Yvonne Reddick.

Oil refineryOil refinery
Oil refinery

University of Central Lancashire researcher Yvonne has won a national grant of £92,700 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and will work with Magma poetry magazine to help inspire others to write about environmental issues.

The two-year Leadership Fellowship, will see Yvonne developing new ways to write about the burning issue of climate change and the oil industry.

Yvonne, who will write, research and publish the poetry, described the grant as career-changing and added:

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"Human beings have changed the climate, exploited the oceans, and mined the bedrock beneath our feet. We are living through the Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

"Geologists are proposing that we have entered the ‘Anthropocene’ – a new time-period shaped by human actions. But not everyone is equally affected by these environmental changes."

She grew up in the oil-towns of Kuwait City and Aberdeen so she plans to use poetry to take readers on a journey to desert oilfields and the North Sea’s storm-lashed platforms. Interviewing oil geologists will help her to write about petroleum, power and pollution.

Writers will have the chance to send their poems to an Anthropocene Issue of Magma poetry magazine next year and besides the workshops she is planning a conference to bring academics together to talk about how culture is responding to the Anthropocene

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For a new academic book, Yvonne will be digging into the archives to uncover how the likes of Seamus Heaney wrote his bog-poems, and analysing how Pascale Petit’s poems bring us face to face with an Indian tiger.

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