Creative Conversations: Vik Shirley

Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor, critic & academic from Bristol, England, now living in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), her pamphlets, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua) and Poets (The Red Ceilings Press), and her book of photo-poetry Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) were all published 2020-2022.

Her chthonic sequel to Corpses, Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), featuring illustrations by Joshua Rothes, will be published in Autumn, as will Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems (zimZalla).

Vik’s work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, The Rialto, Magma, 3am Magazine, Tentacular, Perverse, Shearsman and Tears in the Fence, in America: Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters,The Indianapolis Review and Tiny Molecules. Her column, ‘Commitment to Chush’ runs regularly in Firmament magazine.

Her writing has featured in many anthologies, most recently in Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, edited by Peter Johnson and Cassandra Atherton.

She is a member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and presented a paper on the Grotesque-Surreal at the ISSS 2022 conference. She will be presenting her paper, ‘Izumi Suzuki and the Sc-Fi Surreal’ at the 2023 conference in Houston, Texas.

A Poetry School tutor, teaching on the Surreal Narrative and the Grotesque in Poetry, Vik has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham, where her supervisor was the Forward Prize-winning poet and novelist, Luke Kennard.

A regular performer at the European Poetry Festival, Vik is Associate Editor of Sublunary Editions and Co-Editor of Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius magazine.

This event is live, in-person in the university chapel. It is also watchable online. A zoom link for online attendance will be emailed to those who book a ticket.

Host or Publisher Creative Writing Admin Team