What’s On: North East Literature and Book Events in February 2020

This February's North East Book Events listing is full of literary events in Durham, Sunderland, Newcastle, Teesside and beyond. If you're an event organiser we can update this listing throughout the month, so please share with us. And if you're reading this, get out and support some of these activities and the excellent cultural scene...

Climate Crisis in Dystopian Durham: Review of O Man of Clay, by Eliza Mood

Set partly in a future Hartlepool, Eliza Mood’s novel O Man of Clay brings the realities of a global climate crisis back to the North East, a historical centre of the industrial revolution. Paul Cockburn reviews an inventive and well-constructed account of a multifaceted issue. This review was first published on Paul Cockburn's own blog....

New Podcast: Poet Caroline Bird Speaks to the 98 Percent

Stream here or download via your favourite podcast player.[Embedded player will appear here] “Poetry doesn’t ask you how old you are at the door”, says Caroline Bird, reflecting on the fact that her first collection, Looking at Letterboxes, was published when she was aged just 15. Since then, Caroline has authored four more collections, won...

Four Novels Which Unexpectedly Respond to Environmental Crises

From the watery apocalypses of J.G. Ballard to the bleak dystopia of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, many readers will have encountered fiction that is overtly concerned with climate crisis. However, drawing on his latest research published in our Postgraduate English journal, Alex J. Calder argues that even when seemingly not ‘about’ the environment, much of...

New Podcast: The Geographic and Linguistic Identity of the American Midwest

Do you walk on a sidewalk or a pavement? Eat fries or chips? The differences between American and British English can seem trivial at times, but they point to a deeper debate around language and identity that has been fought in the literary sphere as well as in everyday life. What differentiates American writers from...