Creative Conversations: Eleanor Rees

Eleanor Rees reading from and in conversation about her work in the Creative Conversations series.

Dr Eleanor Rees is senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope University and lives in Birkenhead on the Wirral peninsula, UK

Eleanor Rees’s visionary poetry immerses you in another world from which you leave transformed. A hypnotic reader, her poems beguile you with sound patterns and vivid imagery. Folklore, myth and metamorphoses are recurrent themes. Her pamphlet collection Feeding Fire(Spout, 2001) received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and her first full length collection Andraste’s Hair(Salt, 2007) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, UK and the Irish Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award. Her second collection is Eliza and the Bear(Salt, 2009). In 2015, Eleanor published a long pamphlet Riverine (Gatehouse, 2015) and a third collection Blood Child(Pavilion, 2015). As Nicky Arscott writes in Poetry Wales, ‘Rees has an outstanding ability to act as a conduit between past and present. It is as though she has tapped into an ancient reservoir ‘remarkable and unsung’, and stepped aside in order for the reader to experience the torrent of its mysterious element uninterrupted by poetic ego or personal agenda. She slips like silt between and into different forms: seagull, mineral, light. A diver into – and retriever of – other realms and substances, she is made of mud ‘so otherly, otherly’. Eleanor’s fourth collection of poetry The Well at Winter Solstice(Salt, 2019) received a Northern Writers’ Award 2018. Selections of Eleanor’s poems have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Lithuanian, Slovak and Romanian. (Versopolis, 2016, 2019). As the philosopher Rosi Braidotti says, ‘These are poems written in a state of grace, trusting in the infinite wisdom of the universe. And Rees gives us hope that all manner of things shall be well in the end, if we are only able to shift our vision.’ Her fifth collection is Tam Lin of the Winter Park(Guillemot Press, 2022).

Eleanor published Portents and Portals: New and Selected Poems (Guillemot Press, 2024) and Eyes in the Wood: Occasional Prose (Broken Sleep, 2025).

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