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Dr Helen Tookey

Liverpool Screen School

Faculty of Arts Professional and Social Studies

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Helen Tookey is Reader in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, where she has taught since 2015. Prior to that, she worked in editorial and production roles for publishing companies including Liverpool University Press and Carcanet Press. Her first full-length poetry collection, Missel-Child, was published by Carcanet in 2014 and was shortlisted for the 2015 Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet In the Glasshouse was published by HappenStance Press in 2016. Her second Carcanet collection, City of Departures, was published in July 2019 and was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize. Alongside poems, the book includes a creative non-fiction essay exploring themes of travel, European identity, and responses to visual art. Her third Carcanet collection, In the Quaker Hotel, was published in May 2022; reviewers have described it as a 'haunting and compelling collection', 'ecopoetry with a psychologically effective perspective shift', and as exhibiting 'both a painterly precision and an interest in the collusions of subjective and geological or ecological time'.

In 2016 Helen published a CD/booklet in collaboration with musician Sharron Kraus, If You Put Out Your Hand (Wounded Wolf Press), and has subsequently performed with Sharron and with guitarist Nick Jonah Davis. She is also developing collaborative projects with sound artist Martin Heslop; tracks from this work were featured at a 'Translation as Collaboration' event as part of the AHRC-funded Poettrio Experiment project (https://poettrioexperiment.com/), and have been broadcast on the online platforms Radiophrenia, Helicotrema and Radio Space Borealis. In September 2009, Helen and Martin were awarded a two-week residency at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia, to make new text/sound work responding to the location; this work is forthcoming as pamphlet and CD with Longbarrow Press.

Helen has also published critical work on twentieth-century writers including Anais Nin and Malcolm Lowry. She is part of an ongoing programme of Merseyside-based events focusing on Lowry, which has included a major international conference in July 2017, hosted jointly by LJMU and Bluecoat. With Bryan Biggs, she co-edited the 2009 illustrated volume Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World (Liverpool University Press, 2009), and (also with Bryan Biggs) the edited volume Remaking the Voyage: New Essays on Malcolm Lowry and In Ballast to the White Sea (Liverpool University Press, 2020), the first academic book to focus on Lowry's 'lost' novel In Ballast to the White Sea. She is currently Co-Investigator (alongside Dr Alan Dunn, of Leeds Beckett University, as Lead Investigator) on an AHRC Research Network project focused on Lowry's ecologically inflected short stories, which brings together a network of artists, researchers and the public on ferry sailings between Liverpool and the Isle of Man, exploring sounds and words in relation to plastics pollution and care for our oceans (project website https://malcolmlowry.com/).

Helen is currently working on a creative non-fiction book exploring her relationship to the work of Malcolm Lowry and engaging with issues of place, landscape and belonging. Titled Outward Bound from Liverpool: Reading Malcolm Lowry, the book will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2026. She is also experimenting with longer poems, and mixtures of poetry and prose, which focus on encounters with places, and draw on the writings of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to try to explore ideas around identity through time. 'A Choice of Paths' was published in the Long Poem Magazine issue 30 (winter 2023).

Languages

German
French

Degrees

2000, Wadham College, University of Oxford, UK, DPhil in English Literature
1991, Newnham College, University of Cambridge, UK, MPhil in Philosophy
1990, University of Sheffield, UK, BA Hons in Philosophy

Academic appointments

Reader in Creative Writing, Liverpool John Moores University, 2022 - present
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University, 2015 - 2022
Associate Tutor in Creative Writing, English, Edge Hill University, 2011 - 2012
Associate Lecturer in English, English, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2002 - 2003

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