billylinguist Creative Writing, Linguistics, English Language, English Literature

PALA in Uppsala 2026

Three colleagues from Northumbria will be talking at the 2026 PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association) conference in Uppsala in August 2026.

Billy Clark and Tony Williams will be talking in the Special Interest Group workshop on Pragmatics and Literature. Billy’s talk is titled Pragmatics, reasoning and literary evaluation. Tony’s is ‘I simply do not know what I am doing’: writerly knowledge, ignorance, mystery and mythology.

Saeed Hosseini’s talk is in the main programme and is titled Viewpoint as event: bridging lyric addressand cognitive grammar in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’.

Here are the slides for Billy’s talk:

Billy PALA August 2026

As ever, the conference is packed with talks and events exploring a very wide range of topics in stylistics. As the PALA programme demonstrates, stylistics is a very broad and dynamic discipline, applying ideas from a very wide range of areas in exploring aspects of the production, interpretation and evaluation of a very wide variety of texts.

billylinguist Creative Writing, English Language, English Literature, Linguistics

MLA Toronto 2026

In January 2026, two Northumbria colleagues, Billy Clark and Tony Williams will take part in a special session on ‘Producing and Evaluating Style’ at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Toronto

The session will explore ideas from Billy’s project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (MRF-2024-043), which will develop an account of the pragmatic processes involved in producing, interpreting and evaluating communicative acts, as well as how all of these processes interact

You can read more about the MLA session on the MLA Humanities Commons site here:

https://producingandevaluatingstyle.mla.hcommons.org

There will also soon be more information on the project page:

https://northumbriaenglish.org/producing-and-evaluating-style/

Here are the slides for Billy’s talk:

https://northumbriaenglish.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/billyclark-mla2026-pragmaticsandstyle.pptx

billylinguist Creative Writing, English, Uncategorized, writing, literature and cultural studies

Fiona Shaw: ‘Outwalkers’, ‘Tell It To The Bees’ and Yaddo

 

fionashaw

We are delighted that our colleague Fiona Shaw has been nominated for 2019 CILIP Carnegie Medal for her novel Outwalkers  You can find the full list of nominations here

To add to this, Fiona has also been awarded a month’s residency at the prestigious Yaddo artists’ retreat, whose prior residents have included James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Katherine Anne Porter and Jeffrey Eugenides: https://www.yaddo.org/about/history/

tellittothebees

Meanwhile, the film version of Fiona’s novel Tell It To The Bees has been appearing at festivals, including at Cannes and the Toronto film festival

We are very happy about this well-deserved recognition of Fiona’s work

billylinguist English

Clearing Day 2018

It’s clearing day at Northumbria. Several colleagues are helping answer calls from applicants for our BA courses in English Language, Literature and Creative Writing and also our Foundation Year in Humanities.

The clearing hotline number here is 0800 085 1085

If you’re not involved in clearing and/or would like to read some thoughts from colleagues in English at Northumbria, here are some recent articles which appeared in The Conversation:

Tony Williams on the story Cat Person and #metoo

Claire Nally on graphic novels

Katy Shaw on why the novel is not dead

Sarah Duffy on how we think about time

Claudine van Hensbergen on Hamilton

Here also is a piece by colleagues at Bradford and Swansea on how students use social media in making decisions about university applications