Biographies
Professor Hugh Haughton
Hugh Haughton is Professor of English at York University. His main interests lie in the field of modernism, modern poetry and poetics; the literature of nonsense; letters and life-writing; and twentieth-century Irish literature.
He is the author of The Poetry of Derek Mahon (OUP, 2007), the first full-scale study of the poet, as well as numerous essays on twentieth-century poetry. These include studies of Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Denis Devlin, and Samuel Beckett and Dante. Recent essays include ‘Hiding places: Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth’ (2006), ‘Anthologizing War’ (2007), ‘Journeys to War: W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Empson In China’ (2007), and ‘Alice and Ulysses's Bough: Some Versions of Nonsense in Empson’ (2007). In the field of nonsense, he has edited The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (1988) and the Centenary edition of Lewis Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1998). He has also edited Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (1985), Rudyard Kipling, Wee Willie Winkie (1988), Richard Howard, Selected Poems (1990) and (with Adam Phillips) John Clare in Context (1994), the first collection of critical essays on Clare.
His recent editorial projects include Elizabeth Bowen, To the North (1999), Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny for the New Penguin Freud (2003), and Second World War Poems (Faber, 2004). He has recently co-edited (with Valerie Eliot) The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volumes 1 and 2. He is currently completing Irish Crossings, a collection of critical essays on Irish literature and cultural translation, and beginning a study of modern poets and their letters.
Professor Angela Leighton
Angela Leighton is Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College. She is primarily interested in poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also in nineteenth-century aestheticism and its continuing legacy in the twentieth, in particular the work of Woolf, Stevens, Bishop, Plath and W.S. Graham.
She is the author of, among other works, Shelley and the Sublime (1984), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1986), Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992), and, most recently, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (2007). In addition, she has published two books of poems, A Cold Spell (2000) and Sea Level (2007). She is editor of the newly published book, Voyages Over Voices: Critical Essays on Anne Stevenson (2010), and is currently writing a book on the music of poetry.
Professor Anne Fadiman
Anne Fadiman is an author, essayist, editor, and teacher. Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), chronicles the trials of an epileptic Hmong child and her family living in Merced, California. Fadiman's sensitive, incisive treatment of the unbreachable gulf between the Hmong and American medical systems won her a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. The Washington Post called the book ‘an intriguing, spirit-lifting, extraordinary exploration.’ The book continues to be taught at universities both as literary journalism and as a casebook for cross cultural sensitivity in general; it is also widely read by medical practitioners who wish to offer more effective care to patients from other cultures.
As the inaugural Francis Writer in Residence, Yale University’s first endowed appointment in nonfiction writing, Anne Fadiman serves as both a professor in the English department and a mentor to students considering careers in writing or editing.
Her best-selling essay collection Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) is a book entirely about books — from the purchasing of them, to the reading of them, to the handling of them (always write in the margins; go ahead and crack the spines; pay no mind if you drop crumbs between the pages; shelve American literature alphabetically by author, English literature chronologically). The Observer called Ex Libris ‘witty, enchanting, and supremely well-written.’ It has been translated into thirteen languages.
For seven years Anne Fadiman edited The American Scholar, the venerable literary quarterly, described by The New York Times as ‘an intellectual giant.’ Her essays and articles have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among many other publications. She has won National Magazine Awards for both reporting and essays.
Anne Fadiman is the editor of both the 2003 edition of Best American Essays and Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (2005). An essay collection, entitled At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays was published in 2007 and was a Radio 4 Book of the Week.
‘Ms. Fadiman tells her story with a novelist’s grace, playing the role of cultural broker, comprehending those who do not comprehend each other and perceiving what might have been done or said to make the outcome different.’ — The New York Times
‘Some writers. . . have done exceedingly well at taking in one or another human scene, then conveying it to others — James Agee, for instance. . . and George Orwell. . . It is in such company that Anne Fadiman’s writing belongs.’ — Robert Coles
Professor Edna Longley
Professor Edna Longley is Professor Emerita in the School of English, Queen's University Belfast. She is one of the most influential critics writing on modern Irish and British poetry, and one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Irish culture. While earning international renown for her many publications, she has also had a huge and enabling influence on the literary culture of Northern Ireland, especially at Queen's University, through her teaching, and through the English Society that flourished under her direction, giving much impetus to the creation of The Seamus Heaney Centre. Married to the distinguished poet Michael Longley, she was the recipient of an honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin in 2003.
Her publications include an edition of Edward Thomas’s prose writings, A Language Not To Be Betrayed (1981) from Carcanet, and four critical books: Louis MacNeice: A Study (1988), Poetry in the Wars (1986), The Living Stream: Literature & Revisionism in Ireland (1994) and Poetry & Posterity (2000). She also edited The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry (2000) and Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008). She is also one of the editors for the planned Oxford University Press series: Edward Thomas: The Essential Prose.