Creative Non-Fiction
Standing at the forefront of the growing genre of Creative Non-Fiction, our authors explore the world through research and reflection, revealing a wide range of true stories with personal, social, and historical significance. Topics covered include medical poetry, whale strandings, tree climbing, rewilding, alternative geography, and Victorian celebrity and romance. The journalistic and often personal nature of these books reveals perhaps unexpected aspects of some of the academics in our department, as they diverge from their primary research interests, and guide readers through a wide range of fascinating topics.
Works on Creative Non-Fiction by our departmental staff
The Tree Climbing Cure
Our relationship with trees is a lengthy, complex one. Since we first walked the earth we have, at various times, worshiped them, felled them and even talked to them. For many of us, though, our first memories of interacting with trees will be of climbing them.
Exploring how tree climbers have been represented in literature and art in Europe and North America over the ages, The Tree Climbing Cure unpacks the curative value of tree climbing, examining when and why tree climbers climb, and what tree climbing can do for (and say about) the climber's mental health and wellbeing.
Bringing together research into poetry, novels, and paintings with the science of wellbeing and mental health and engaging with myth, folklore, psychology and storytelling, Tree Climber also examines the close relationship between tree climbing and imagination, and questions some longstanding, problematic gendered injunctions about women climbing trees.
Black Ops and Beaver Bombing
Britain is teeming with wildlife, often in the most unexpected places. There are stone mines where bats hang out with pot-smoking teenagers and water voles thrive without water in Glaswegian parklands. Our coastlines are laden with seals. That's the good news. The bad news is that a quarter of British mammals are at imminent risk of extinction.
Tim Kendall and Fiona Mathews take us on a safari unlike any other. Armed with binoculars, a Thermos and, regrettably, an inexhaustible supply of puns, they travel from Scotland to the Isles of Scilly in search of their elusive subjects.
You'll find answers to questions you never thought to ask: do pine marten droppings really smell like Parma Violets? Should we give squirrels access to family planning? And what do wild boar have in common with a certain royal? Black Ops and Beaver Bombing is a celebration of Britain's marvellous mammals, and a rallying cry to save them.
Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger
When Peter Riley was thirteen, a woman with blue hair and a comet tattoo asked him to help load the jaw of a sperm whale into the back of a Volvo 245. The encounter set Riley on a decades-long quest to make sense of what had happened.
Enter the secretive world of whale scavengers. When a whale washes up on one of Britain's coasts, a fugitive community descends to claim trophies from the carcass. Some are driven by magical beliefs. Some are motivated by profit: there is a black market for everything from ambergris to whaletooth sex toys. But for others, the need goes much deeper.
Join Riley on a tour of a stranded kingdom's weird outer reaches, where nothing is as it seems. Meet witches, pedlars, fetishists, conspiracy theorists and fallen aristocrats. And prepare for a final revelation, as the mystery of the comet woman tangles with the enigmatic symbol of Leviathan itself, beached on Britain's fatal shore.
A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine
A Body of Work includes poems by writers from the dawn of Enlightenment to the 21st Century and explores changing attitudes to medicine, health and the body. The book is divided into eight thematic sections, each of which includes a chronological range of poetry and excerpts of important historical and contextual medical writing.
The sections are:
- Body as machine
- Nerves, mind, and brain
- Consuming
- Illness, disease, and disability
- Treatment
- Hospitals, practitioners, and professionals
- Sex, evolution, and reproduction
- Ageing and dying
Britannia Obscura
From investigations of caves and megaliths to canals and airspace, Joanne Parker reveals a country with countless competing centres and ceaselessly shifting borders – a land where one person’s sleepy, unexceptional province will always be the busy heart of another’s map.
Britannia Obscura opens our eyes to the infinitely layered, rich and surprising landscape of Britain.
Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance
Mr and Mrs Disraeli is a dual biography of Victorian Prime Minister and novelist Benjamin Disraeli and his wife Mary Anne. From the outset the couple were an unlikely pairing, but together they rose to the pinnacle of nineteenth-century society. Drawing on the couple’s letters and Mary Anne’s own formidable archives Daisy Hay reveals the heady mix of romance and power that fuelled their relationship and chronicles the way in which together the Disraelis transformed their unconventional marriage into an enduring love story.