Reading and in Conversation: Bridging the Creative/Critical Divide

Ingrid Horrocks is a travel writer, essayist, poet, and scholar, and is Associate Professor in English and Creative writing at Massey University, Wellington. At this special event, she will read from her creative and critical work, while discussing the movement and connections between. The conversation with JT Welsch will explore the challenges, pleasures and rewards of bridging the creative/critical divide.   

Ingrid came to York in 1999 as a Commonwealth Scholar to do an interdisciplinary Masters in Eighteenth Century Studies and from this published a genre-bending travel book, Travelling with Augusta, 1835 and 1999 (Victoria University Press, 2003). This book is part memoir, part love story, past history of women’s travel, and since then her projects have tended to involve parallel creative and critical strands. She went on to a PhD in English at Princeton and her publications include two poetry books, a monograph, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), a co-edited essay collection, Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand (Victoria UP, 2016), in which scholars and creative writers were invited into conversation, and many journal articles and creative essays. 

Her most recent project, ‘Gone Swimming’, a travel piece structured around swimming in polluted rivers, was runner-up in the 2017 Landfall Essay competition. This developed alongside a journal article she has forth-coming in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, ‘The Ecologist and the Journalist: Imagining Place in the New Zealand Nonfiction of Geoff Park and Steve Braunias.’

This event is part of the Writers at York series, which offers a lively programme of public readings and workshops, and aims to celebrate and explore the work of emerging and established contemporary writers.