Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Rose Anderson is a lifelong poetry junkie living in Chapel Allerton, Leeds. She is slowly recovering after many years of illness, rediscovering in her forties all the ordinary-extraordinary things she hasn’t done since her twenties, from hanging out the washing to visiting the seaside. Her poetry pamphlet, Falling Upwards Through the Night was first published in 2002 and she is hoping to start putting together a new collection before too long.

Darrell Barnes read Modern Languages at St Edmund Hall and joined Barclays Bank DCO after leaving university. He worked in East Africa, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland and other places beyond Ultima Thule before concluding that the rewards of work were vastly inferior to the those of working in the voluntary sector in various capacities. He lives in Putney where he once rowed - alas, no longer.

Sonja Benskin Mesher lives in Llanelltyd, Wales. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer. A Small Life, her chapbook of poetry and art, was published and distributed by take-it-to-the-street-poetry.

David Braund lives in Burgess Hill, Sussex. He studied Geography at St Edmund Hall, and is now a retired computer software consultant. He has contributed to the Oxford Magazine.

Alexander Bridge is currently reading English at St Edmund Hall. He runs Teddy Hall Writers and is a facilitator on the Hall Writer’s Forum. He edits poetry for the Oxford Review of Books, the Teddy Hall Anthology and The Gallery, and has had a few poems published in Oxford student publications. He has no idea what he’s going to do with the rest of his life, but doesn’t really want to do anything in particular.

Tony Brignull joined an insurance company at the age of seventeen, then did National Service with the RAF in Germany 1956 - 58. After a spell as a trainee teacher in Dalston, he worked in the advertising industry, responsible for successful campaigns such as Parker, Birds Eye and Cinzano. After retirement in 1996 he wrote poetry and stories, winning a couple of national contests and one international competition; and in 2002 he went to St Edmund Hall to read English, followed by an MA at King’ s College London, specialising in Life Writing.

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Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and has lived in the US, Ireland, England, and France writing poems about memory and politics. She has a doctorate from Balliol College, Oxford. Her publications include a monograph entitled Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, two collections of poems, Crossing the Carpathians and The House of Straw, and a memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police.

Sandie Byrne is Associate Professor in English, University of Oxford and Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. She is the author of a number of works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.

Matthew Carter read English at St Edmund Hall and went down in 2017.

Tom Clucas read English at St Edmund Hall and completed his DPhil on Cowper and Wordsworth. He has since worked as a postdoctoral researcher and latterly Deputy Professor of English and American Literature and Culture at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. His first collection of poetry - which is still undergoing protean revision - is due to appear in 2018.

Anonymous Critic (who occasionally masquerades as Anonymous Writer or just Anonymous) matriculated in 19 mumble mumble and read every subject on offer, thus contributing to the wide range of pieces that have been published in the Forum over the years. Mysterious, s/he keeps to him/herself, and makes timely interventions.

Stuart Estell read English at St Edmund Hall in the mid-90s and is a founder member of the Hall Writers' Forum. His novel Verruca Music was published by Eight Cuts Gallery Press in 2011, and he has recently completed a new volume of poetry entitled End of the Season.

Amelia Gabaldoni read English at St Edmund Hall and was also President of the JCR.

A Gentleman needs no introduction.

Tony Hufton is a freelance writer living in Norwich. He studied English at St Edmund Hall.

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Justin Gosling taught philosophy for many years at St Edmund Hall before serving as its Principal from 1982-96. He has written numerous philosophy books, and is the author of The Jackdaw and the Jacaranda, a collection of poems.

Peter J King was active on the London poetry scene in the mid-1970s, running Tapocketa Press, and co-editing words worth magazine with Alaric Sumner. He started studying philosophy in 1980, going on to read for the BPhil at Brasenose in 1983, then a DPhil, and is now lecturer in philosophy at Pembroke College and at St Edmund Hall. He wrote and published poetry for a while in the mid-1980s, and started again in 2012. He translates poetry from modern Greek (with Andrea Christofidou), and has recently started translating German poetry.

Gerard Lally read English at St Edmund Hall (1971-74) and received his MA in 1980. He is currently living in Thessaloniki, Greece where he taught English until his retirement in 2015.

Alex Matraxia is a second year student reading English Literature at St Edmund Hall. He is fiction editor for The ISIS magazine in Oxford, and has contributed poetry and prose to recent issues. He is interested in experimenting with poetic voice, bringing together conversation, gossip and abstraction into a poetic discourse. He is also an editor for St Edmund Hall’s Arts magazine, The Gallery, and is collaborating on various art magazines and zines based in London, including Art Babes and Sirens.

Jude Cowan Montague is a writer and artist from London. She has worked as an archivist on the Reuters and ITN video collections and has published poetry relating to news agency video. She is working on her third collection The Wires, 2012 about international news stories to be published by Dark Windows Press. She is also a musician and composer.

Lucy Newlyn is co-founder of the Hall Writers’ Forum and its host. She taught English at St Edmund Hall for thirty-three years until her retirement in 2017. She has published widely on English Romanticism, and edited a number of poetry anthologies. Her first collection of poems, Ginnel, was published with Carcanet in 2005; and her second, Earth’s Almanac, was published in 2015. Her memoir Diary of a Bipolar Explorer is forthcoming

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with Signal Books in February 2018. She is Literary Editor of The Oxford Magazine.

Carolyn O’Connell is a poet and lives in Hartford, Cheshire after moving from London. She is a member of Blaze (Mid Cheshire) Stanza & Vale Royal Writers Group. She is listed on Poetrypf.com and has been published in magazines and anthologies. Between Bamboo (2002) is available from Amazon and Timelines (2014) from Indigo Dreams Publishing: http://www.indigodreams.co.uk/carolyn-oconnell/4586178898

Brian Smith read English at SEH in the 60s, and spent thirty years teaching literature and music in Sixth form education in the South West of England. It was not until his retirement to France that he began to write and translate poetry himself, with the encouragement of the members of the Hall Writers' Forum whose constructive suggestions and close attention to detail helped him to find a voice and overcome a creative block that had lasted over forty years.

Mike Spilberg Born Walthamstow, 1949, Mike spent his formative years in Ibadan, Nigeria interspersed with lengthy holidays in Naples, before going to school in Brentwood. He emerged from three happy years of English at SEH a married man with a degree no better than you would expect, and took to teaching (Surrey and Hampstead) to tide him over until retirement, since when he has returned to writing after years of day-dreaming about it. He has four adult children and something like nine grandchildren. After living in SW Surrey for many years he lives currently in East Hampshire.

Mohammad Talib taught Sociology at Jamia Millia Islamia University (Delhi), from 1979 to 2001. In 2002, he came to Oxford as the Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz fellow in the Anthropology of Muslim Societies at the Oxford Centre for Islamic studies. He is also Islamic Centre lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.

Neville Teller won a scholarship to read Modern History, coming up to the Hall in 1952. He was on the committee of the OUDS, president of the Experimental Theatre Club, and coxed the 1953 Fourth VIII. He freelanced for the BBC, and in 1956 joined British Cellophane as a junior advertising executive. Thereafter he ran a double career: one in advertising, marketing, publishing, the Civil Service and finally a national cancer charity;

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the other as a writer for BBC radio and related fields. He was made an MBE in 2006 for services to broadcasting and to drama.

Natasha Walker lives in Germany and works for companies, governments, foundations and change-makers shaping strategy on climate change adaptation, biodiversity, poverty and other global issues. She studied English Literature and Modern Languages (German) at SEH and Göttingen University. She has a grown-up son at Manchester University and a seven year old daughter, loves Mozart and Bartok, Bach and Shostakovich, hiking, Cornwall and her enormous family. She’s constantly writing a novel, but actually manages to finish poems and proverbs.

Jamie Whelan spent over thirty years in teaching, latterly as Head of Languages in a large grammar school with responsibility for its specialist language college for ten years. He enjoys writing, especially narrative fiction and completed a first novel at the beginning of 2017. Now retired, he has more time to visit his two grown-up sons. The elder lives in Berlin and is a professional comedian and singer, performing comedy in German at venues throughout the country. The younger is a history lecturer about to leave a post in Oxford for a permanent lectureship at Liverpool University.

Cazzie Winterton is in her second year reading English at St Edmund Hall. Having written songs in the past, when she got to University she thought she would try her hand at poetry. She is still at it with the music, spending time practising, writing and performing with her (largely Teddy Hall) band, Stephen Hero.

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