The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing : All Pages
- Home
- Copyright
- Picture Credits
- Accessibility Statement
- Professor Elleke Boehmer
- People
- Research
- Lives in Medicine
- Dr Kate Kennedy
- Re:dress Women Composers
- Southern Imagining
- Professor Jacek L. Mostwin, M.D
- Study
- Visiting Doctoral Studentships
- Dr Katherine Collins
- Professor Dame Hermione Lee
- Elleke Boehmer wins Olive Schreiner Award for Prose
- Contact
- About
- Professor Ros Ballaster
- Professor Michael Burden
- Professor Jonathan Cross
- News
- Blog
- Woven into the Fabric of the Text: Subversive Material Metaphors in Academic Writing
- Against Biography: Adam Phillips
- Alison Light's OCLW keynote published in the Kenyon Review
- Hermione Lee honoured for contributions to biography
- Dangerous Words: A Biography
- Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds
- Dr Mark Lee
- Postponed - Benjamin Zephaniah
- Cancelled: Writing motherhood
- Visiting Scholarship Scheme
- Visiting Doctoral Studentship Scheme
- Visiting Researchers
- Hilary 2020 Term Card
- What's On
- Life-Writing Day with the English Faculty
- Significant Lives: biography, autobiography, gender, and women's history in South Asia
- Southern Biographies Programme
- Sir Thomas Allen in conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy and pianist Simon Over
- Support CLW
- New opera collaboration, The Gentlewomen
- Dr Sandra Mayer
- Writing Queer Lives 2020 Programme
- Life-Writing Events
- Life-Writing of Immeasurable Events
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Life-writing inspiration
- LIVE writing
- Lexicon of a pandemic
- Just before Corona kicked in
- Of quill pens and keypads: the psychological urgency of life-writing
- Five things...
- Too Much of Each Other
- Never to be seen again
- Small life changing events in quarantine
- Journal, 8th April 2020 - Five hours
- Dreaming
- Reflections
- Reflections prompt
- 'Sheltered Home’ with Elderlies
- Five things in the time of coronavirus
- Five beings met at Oxford
- A Museum and a Drooping Rose
- Five
- Diary entry, Tuesday, April 14
- Five things...
- Today and Tomorrow
- Country Walk
- The Post in the Hall
- Take hold of this time
- If I lived...
- A New Life
- Some twine, some flowers, goat's cheese, ten thousand, and some pesto
- Individual change in times of social crisis: Fisher’s Personal Transition Curve
- What is this time for
- Sonnet For The Day (Not Sonnet 19)
- Keeping Tabs
- An Inventory
- No news today, thanks
- Something I have found...
- It is morning
- Reflections
- Patchwork pictures, clutter, books, and improbable stories
- Reflections On Home
- Knowing My Place
- Arranging the China / Do not Dissolve
- My island life
- To the beach or not – short path through lock-down
- Life-light
- When will things get back to normal?
- Care
- Dwelling
- Letter from Madrid: Today They Let the Children Out
- Three Mornings
- A Spring Funeral in 2020
- Wasp Saviour
- Watch the sun come up
- Things I have to face
- On The Cusp Of Morning
- We are more alike than we think
- 12 May is Diary Day!
- OCLW Founder, Professor Dame Hermione Lee
- Great Writers Inspire
- Resources
- Change
- Breakfast
- Hot Chilly Morning
- There's no Danger here
- CV Mornings, Reflections
- Haiku after loss
- It is morning
- The Wisdom of Bears
- A change in morning habits
- Eavesdropping
- Back to Normal – No Thanks
- Not only….but also
- Nothing in Vain
- Viral Rhythms
- Return Voyage Home
- The normality of lockdown
- Moving Objects
- To Be, or Not to Be...?
- Corona Lost & Found: Tokyo Expat Edition
- Lives of Houses
- Accelerate Hub
- Picked up and pocketed
- Cherry cannot be Pear: Becoming my normal
- 8th May 2020. Befreiung
- Stay Alert!
- Dear Diary
- One day diary for Mass Observation
- Lives of Houses, by Hermione Lee
- Dear...silence
- Administrator Further Particulars
- Rose of Temperaments
- May 12th 2020
- Significant Lives: biography, autobiography, and women's history in South Asia, by Supriya Chaudhuri
- Essays in life-writing
- Diary Day
- Not Just Coronavirus: Disturbed’s “The Sound of Silence” Cover
- Soundtrack the New Unreal
- When it was raining
- When will things get back to normal?
- Beach and Baron
- Where were you when
- “The life to uncover” Virginia Woolf’s romantic life writing
- El Greco: The Bivalent Artist
- "But I’m nothing special…”: Reflections on Writing the Lives of ‘Ordinary’ People
- The Elusive Subject: Biographies of Exiles
- Kept, and Staying
- 12 May - whose story?
- Why did it take a crisis?
- HERO
- Japan's New Normal May 24: A Found Poem
- The Birthday Rose
- Trains not taken and the kindness of strangers
- Spare a thought for the dogless during lockdown
- Things Happen to Letters
- Dear Annie
- The silent ways of the linden tree
- Beginning of a memoir
- The Blues
- Morning Voices from Tokyo
- A Daughter
- Psychorona
- Look
- Locked in Locked out
- State Sponsored Literature
- Writers as Political Activists
- Art & Action: Authorship, Celebrity, and Politics
- Literary-Political Networks and Organisations
- Female Authorship and Activism
- Authorial Border-Crossings and Freedom of Speech
- Literary Celebrity, Activism, and the ‘Industry’
- The Writers’ Activism of PEN
- Authorship and Authority
- Balancing Acts: Negotiating Relations in Response to Trauma in life-writing
- Narrative Agency, Life Writing, and the Experience of Illness
- ‘Where is this British Empire?’ Doris Lessing’s Life-Writing
- Hazel in a nutshell
- Lockdown Colours
- Mosaics ‘n’ Me
- Dear Dad
- A Bird in the Hand
- Pick-pocket
- Where were you when Elvis died?
- A Message...
- To My Friends
- It is morning over here
- Lock in, lock out, Lock down
- When you put on the mask
- 2020: a novel
- Inscribing biographies in Global South History
- Somewhere
- 2020 in a flash
- Five things in Japan
- IBIS
- Presence and absence at home in the time of Covid
- Wooden friends
- This week
- Locked Down
- Hamazor
- Locked Down!
- We are not a slogan
- Dance like nobody's watching
- Perspectives on Locked in - Locked out
- When I put on a mask
- Four Masks of friendship
- Out of Focus (a novel of 2020)
- Hardly much truth left under the Crown (a novel of 2020)
- Too Far Backward (a novel of 2020)
- The Italian Girl by Matisse
- Journey to the Skies
- Snip snip
- In My Grandmother's Garden
- A Place
- Cullen 3
- Found in the news
- Into the oppressor’s mind, with Carmen Bugan
- Music's War Poets
- Return by Minor Road
- Southern Lives
- A living subject: the life of Tom Stoppard, by Hermione Lee
- From the stave to sounds, into words
- A Life in Text: the Biographical Material in Constance Garnett’s Translations
- Into the oppressor’s mind
- A Life in Text: the Biographical Material in Constance Garnett’s Translations
- Return by Minor Road
- Madrid Again
- Madrid Again
- Edward Maufe, Architect and Cathedral Builder
- Edward Maufe, Architect
- Life-Writing Beyond Words
- From the stave to sounds, into words
- Southern Lives Meeting
- Research Projects
- Research Networks
- Arabic Dialogues
- Artefacts as Actors at Abydos
- Artefacts as Actors at Abydos
- Where life begins and ends, by Katherine Collins
- Monumental lives: group presentation and performance in ancient Egypt
- The Faces of Nefertiti
- Charne Lavery
- Porscha Fermanis
- Dr Louisa Parker (Una)
- Carolyn Philpott
- Elizabeth Leane
- Justine Feyereisen
- Isaac Ndlovu
- Coraline Jortay
- Louis Rogers
- Khutso Eunice Mabokela
- Samantha McCulloch
- The Faces of Nefertiti
- Sarah Comyn
- Elleke Boehmer
- Bernhard Schirg
- Confidence Joseph
- Pablo Wainschenker
- Archie Davies
- Phindezwa Mnyaka
- Priyanka Shivadas
- Elizabeth Lewis Williams
- Joe Shaughnessy
- Emma Parker
- Dr Emma Parker
- Cherwell Friend
- Linton Friend
- Chadlington Supporter
- Legacy Giving
- Sponsor a project or scholar
- Carrol Clarkson
- Cristóbal Pérez Barra
- Dr Tamarin Norwood
- 'In Sickness and in Health': Writing Life through the Essay
- Sylvia Plath: An Iconic Life
- What can life-writing learn from the expressive forms of the animal kingdom?
- Listening to Animals
- A Sliver of Silver
- The Poetics of Displacement
- The Poetics of Displacement
- “In Sickness and in Health”: Writing Life through the Essay
- Freya Marshall Payne
- Writing Lost Lives: Medieval Women and Stillbirth
- Dr Lucy Allen-Goss
- Professor Julie Curtis
- Professor Santanu Das
- Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
- Georgina Ferry
- Professor Roy Foster
- Professor Alexandra Harris
- Professor Marina Mackay
- Professor Kate McLoughlin
- Professor Michèle Mendelssohn
- Professor Rana Mitter
- Dr Sophie Ratcliffe
- Professor Ulrike Roesler
- Professor Marcus du Sautoy
- Dr Ruth Scurr
- Dr Marion Turner
- Professor Bart van Es
- Professor Susan Walker
- Sylvia Plath: An Iconic Life
- Prof Hanna Meretoja
- This Immeasurable Year
- Time to rethink
- Snap retrospective
- Daily walk
- Not writing
- Writing Lost Lives: Medieval Women and Stillbirth
- Oxford Minds Lecture: Belonging
- Dr Carol Peaker
- Oge Nwosu
- Jenny Diski: A Celebration
- Professor David Robey
- Recapturing everyday rituals
- Publications
- On not writing
- Juniper Sling
- Two Poems on Walking
- Pregnancy in the Time of Corona
- Joanna Price
- No writing voice to the thinking noise
- Anything But
- Wings of Freedom
- One whole year
- Time Capsule
- Writing Left Out To Dry On The Line
- Not Writing
- The Opal Sky
- A Seven Sundays Sleep
- Cocooning to survive Lockdown
- Reflections, shape, morning
- Still unfeeling
- A Parasol’s Lament
- 2021 BIO Conference
- Finding the Raga, Amit Chaudhuri in conversation
- The Lives of Naturalists
- Specks
- My Somewhere Place
- Cappuccino Rituals
- Walking With the Swallows
- Daily Struggle With Space and Time
- Not Writing
- A journal of the outside
- Writing Lives: Biography and Beyond
- Richard Mabey & Alexandra Harris: Lives of Naturalists
- What is Life-Writing?
- The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing
- Heather Clark & Hermione Lee: Sylvia Plath, an iconic life
- Friends of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing
- Southern Lives Workshop
- Reading Medical Anecdotes as Narratives of Epistemic Vigilance
- Public life-writing projects
- Writing Underwater
- Long Exposure
- 500 tones / 500 words
- Diary entry, unedited, from 12 May 2020
- WORLDS END
- Simple Affiliations
- Mass Observation May 12th Diary 2020
- The laps of life
- Looking for a smile
- A Bolt from the Blue
- The moment I forgot about the pandemic
- Clicked-away identities
- Call for participants
- Is it shame or is it water? Poetry and research in conversation
- Is it shame or is it water? Poetry and research in conversation call for contributors
- Tamarin Norwood: Writing a very brief life
- Helena Attlee & Sophy Roberts: writing the lives of musical instruments
- Life-Writing Beyond Words: Animal communication and representation
- Ivor Gurney: Dweller in Shadows
- Writing the 'archive of now'
- Frosty Lace Curtain Unveils the Fathoms of the Sea
- How does newness cover silted gold?
- The boy with the golden hair
- John Schad & Alexandra Harris: Imagining a Modernist Life
- Ivor Gurney: Dweller in Shadows
- Jenny Diski: A Celebration
- Weinrebe Lecture: Kate Kennedy in conversation with Hermione Lee
- Donne: Women in Music – New Music 2021
- Weinrebe Lecture: Ruth Scurr in conversation with Alexandra Harris
- Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb on writing group biography
- Essaying Design / The Design of the Essai: Vittoria Fallanca on Montaigne
- Michael Meyer
- Professor Mary E Black
- Che Gossett
- Professor Kirsten E Shepherd-Barr
- Elizabeth Chant
- Obari Gomba
- Tinashe Mushakavanhu
- Tom McLean
- Leeds Inspired project pilot: writing
- Michèle Roberts in conversation with Hermione Lee
- OCLW Weinrebe Lecture: A Line Above the Sky, with Helen Mort
- Life-Writing Workshop with Poet and Novelist Helen Mort
- Professor Lucy Hooberman
- Lara Feigel in conversation with Hermione Lee
- Kiyoshi Kuromiya: A Political Biography
- Anna Funder
- Dr Maria Luisa Di Martino
- Carey Perloff and Hermione Lee In Conversation
- Daisy Hay: Stories of Romantic Birmingham — OCLW and Arts of Place Annual Lecture:
- Lisa Appignanesi in conversation with Hermione Lee
- Duane Roller on Cleopatra: the Myth and the Reality (AWRC/OCLW Lecture)
- Henry Martin
- Religious deviance and psychological medicine in the asylum narratives of Elizabeth T. Stone
- Larry D. Harwood
- Ian Hembrow
- Dr Heidi Stalla
- Professor Isabelle Meuret
- Professor Shirley F. Tung
- Pernille Svare Nygaard
- Charles Pidgeon
- Possibilities and pitfalls in writing about living people
- Friends of OCLW Life-Writing Book Club
- Southern Lives Workshop 2021
- I Used To Live Here Once: Miranda Seymour on writing Jean Rhys's biography, with readings by Diana Quick
- Rebecca Gowers
- 'A Life Between': Ann Jefferson on writing Nathalie Sarraute's biography
- Dr Charlie Lee-Potter
- Writing Groups
- Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop 1: Life-Writing and Scholarship
- Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop 2: Life-Writing in Practice
- Dr Victoria Phillips
- Professor Geoff Beattie
- Hana Navratilova
- Jennifer Homans on 20th-century choreographer George Balanchine, in conversation with Hermione Lee
- Life-Writing Research Network
- Professor Penelope Gardner-Chloros
- Reflections on Life-Writing
- A medical doctor and a writer.
- History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme
- What I’m doing; How to do what I’m doing; How I feel about what I'm doing
- Why be a Life-Writer?
- Historical Lives up Close and Meandering
- Research Network launch party
- OCLW Autofiction reading group on Maurice Blanchot
- Writing Women: A Colloquium
- 'Eve Bites Back': Anna Beer on an alternative history of English literature
- Diana Chester
- Life-Writing and the Digital Sphere
- Dr Diana Chester
- Professor Katherine Culkin
- Luca Pinelli
- Claudia Gualtieri
- Rebecca Donner
- Kim Schoof
- Awakening to the Past in the Present
- Fact vs Fiction: Options and opportunities for your writing
- Oral Histories and Internet Essays
- Chelsea Wallis
- Shaharzad Akbar
- Professor Ada Ferrer
- Dr Arnoud Arps
- Ike Anya
- Bowen Wang
- Gabriella Kelly-Davies
- Cathy Perkins
- Outreach
- Support Our Outreach Work
- Outreach Projects
- Weinrebe Lecture - Writing the Generations: Time, Place and Family Memory in Early Modern England
- Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard
- Research Network Session 2
- Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop TT1: Process, Collaboration - and NOT Writing a Book
- Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop TTII: Making Things Up
- Dr Elissa Rodkey
- Dr Jackie Uí Chionna
- Life-Writing Methods Workshop
- Subscribe
- Lucasta Miller: 'Thou wast not born for death': Keats and the Living Art of Writing Literary Lives
- Weinrebe Lecture MT23: Blake Morrison in conversation with Hermione Lee
- Clare Carlisle on George Eliot, Kierkegaard, and Life Writing
- Colloquium: Writing Jewish Women's Lives
- Writing Jewish Women's Lives: Literary Salon 1
- Writing Jewish Women's Lives with Natasha Walter: Literary Salon 2
- Workshop on Publishing Non-Fiction
- Laura Marcus Workshop 1 MT23: On Illness and Life-Writing
- Laura Marcus Workshop 2 (MT23): On International Life-Writing
- Dr Pragya Agarwal
- Research Network Seminar 3: Rewriting Women's Lives
- The Legacies of Nelson Mandela: Ten Years On
- Dr Helena Kelly
- Research Partners
- Professor Julia Miele Rodas
- Professor Diane Watt
- Babcock Lecture on Character in Memoir and Biography
- Babcock Lecture on Learning to Listen: Some Thoughts on Life-Writing
- Babcock Lecture on Eve Bites Back
- ‘I so shaped out my walk’: Charles Dickens’s perambulatory patterns
- ‘“The Gentlewoman from Reedham”: Reencountering Margaret Paston, through her letters, in the 21st Century.’
- Oxford Mosaic Accessibility Statement
- Professor Claire Wilcox
- Professor Xolela Mangcu
- Taryn Tavener-Smith
- Dr Alana Harris
- Weinrebe Lecture: Michael Ignatieff on Life-Writing
- Sarah Ogilvie on The Dictionary People
- Beyond Music series (event 1): Dame Imogen Cooper
- Research
- Laura Marcus Workshop 1 HT24: Digital Life-Writing
- Laura Marcus Workshop 2 HT2024
- Lives of Instruments
- Jewish Women's Voices
- Beyond Music
- Book Launch: A Dirty, Filthy Book: Sex, Scandal, and Annie Besant's Fight in the Victorian Trial of the Century, by Michael Meyer
- POSTPONED: Blanche Cook: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at Seventy-Five
- Writing Jewish Women’s Lives (seminar 1): Meriel Schindler with Rebecca Abrams
- Writing Jewish Women’s Lives (seminar 2): Lisa Appignanesi with Devorah Baum
- Rebecca Abrams
- Research Network Seminar 4: Michael Meyer and Ada Ferrer - Writing Believable Characters
- POSTPONED: Clare Coss, Denise Lynn, and Victoria Phillips - Triggering Biography: Race, Gender, Politics, Disabilities
- Ars Memoriae – Memory Studies Reading Group (session 1)
- Ars Memoriae - Memory Studies Reading Group (session 2)
- Ars Memoriae – Memory Studies Reading Group (session 3)
- Ars Memoriae – Memory Studies Reading Group (session 4)
- Nuri Batuhan Lüleci
- Professor Mary Chapman
- Dr Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
- Laura Marcus Workshop: Autobiographical Fiction and the 1950s Telepathy Wave
- Laura Marcus Workshop— Nuts and Bolts: searches and discoveries in Life-Writing
- Professor Vanessa Botelho
- The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing: Use of cookies on this website
- Writing Jewish Women's Lives seminar: Zoë Waxman, 'Thinking about Women and the Holocaust'
- Writing Jewish Women's Lives seminar: Emily Kopley, 'Creation in the Life and Art of Berta Rosenbaum Golahny'
- Writing Jewish Women's Lives seminar: Aviva Dautch, 'The "Real" Yentl: The Letters of Esther Kreitman'
- Book Launch: The Song of the Whole Wide World
- Unheard Music: talks and discussion
- Eleonora Maio
- Online Research Network: Catherine Coldstream and Dr Felicity James
- Sally Bayley in conversation with Eleonora Maio
- Sir Stephen Hough in Conversation
- Weinrebe Lecture in Birmingham: Fiona Stafford, 'Time and Tide—Lives and Landscapes'
- Professor Robert Brewer Young
- Dr Barbara Boswell
- Ars Memoriae - memory studies reading group (session 1)
- Ars Memoriae - memory studies reading group (session 2)
- Ars Memoriae - memory studies reading group (session 3)
- Ars Memoriae - memory studies reading group (session 4)
- Dr Eleri Watson
- Carlos Amorales: The Sound of Painting
- Dr Kate Kennedy, 'Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound’
- Gwyneth Lewis, 'Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling'
- Prof Goutham Rao, 'Writing for Wellness' Workshop
- Ian Hembrow, 'Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees’ Book Launch
- Dr Dana Mills, 'Dissenting Against War and Colonialism in Writing and in Action'
- Vacancy: Life-Writing Seminar Support Worker
- Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop: Professor Santanu Das, 'E.M.Forster and Mohammed El Adl: leads, clues and muddles'
- Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop: 'Why Life-Writing?'
- Birth, Birthing, and Death: Practices of Writing at the Edges of Life Symposium
- Philippa Smethurst, '20 Ways to Break Free from Trauma' Book Launch
- Jen Sookfong Lee and Sasha Colby, 'Write Local/Think National'
- Academic Writing: Margaret MacMillan
- Non-Fiction Writing: Michael Ignatieff in Conversation with Hermione Lee
- Fiction Writing: Elleke Boehmer in Conversation with Kate Kennedy
- Dr Ann Wroe, ‘Catching Souls’
- Dr Catherine Coldstream
- Prof Nadia Valman and Dr Vivi Lachs, 'Radical Women of the Jewish East End'
- OCLW Life-Writing Research Network Seminar: Michaelmas 2024
- Life-Writing Research Skills: Life-Writing with Government and On-Line Databases
- Smriti Verma
- Telling Middle Eastern Lives
- Dr Astrid Joutseno
- Weinrebe Lecture: Richard Ovenden in Conversation with Hermione Lee
- Book Launch: Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere
- Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop: Prof Laurie Maguire, 'Judith Shakespeare: Her Story'
- Why Medieval Women's Lives Are Still Relevant
- Masterclass: Khaled Alesmael, ‘Rooted in Words: Writing in Your Mother Tongue While in Exile’
- Public Lecture: Khaled Alesmael, 'The Power of Representation: Why Syrian Queer Stories Matter in a Global Context'
- Public Lecture: Tom Lee, The Bullet
- Masterclass: Dr Lucy Burns, 'Writing Shame: Navel Gazing, Subversion, and Subterfuge'
- Public Lecture: Dr Lucy Burns, 'Writing Abortion: Reflections on Larger than an Orange'