Re-Weirding Albion

Explore landscapes of strangeness as we "Re-Weird" Albion and dig down to uncover the dark folklore, uncanny hauntings, and radical myths entangled in our roots.

‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.’ – Max Weber

Many of us feel alienated from the vision of Albion which has existed in the British imagination for centuries as a green and pleasant land of tall ships and hay wains, white cliffs and country houses. Underlying that chocolate box take on rural life are histories of power, control, exclusion and the kind of acquisitiveness and exploitation which has led us to a state of planetary emergency.

From mist-drenched ballads and Blakean visions to folk horror, psychogeography, and contemporary eco-poetics, British poetry has always been a landscape of strangeness. This course will explore how poets past and present have re-enchanted Albion, uncovering its myths, hauntings, and radical re-imaginings. Re-Weirding Albion will facilitate a return to the uncanny, mythic, folkloric, or visionary dimensions of Britain, exploring poets who engage with the strangeness of landscape, the multiplicity of folklore, magic the numinous and the radical imagination of the British Isles. Participants will encounter a range of writers, including Jason Allen-Paisant, Alice Oswald, Dom Bury, Jack Underwood, William Blake, Zaffar Kunial, Penelope Shuttle, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Jay Bernard, Sean Borodale, Dorothea Smartt, Rachel Boast, Holly Pester, Jen Hadfield, and Maggie O’Sullivan.

This course aims to reclaim a feeling of enchantment with the land and a renewed sense of wonder, weirdness and connection inspired by contemporary folk and outsider artists, place-based writers, poets and performers. Participants will create new poems inspired by the themes of the course and receive tutor feedback on this new work.

5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks, starting 15 Jan 2026. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].

What to Expect

Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.

Image credit: @ekrulila

About JLM Morton View Profile

JLM Morton is a writer, celebrant, and community arts producer from Gloucestershire in the west of England. Her poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, The Sunday Telegraph, and elsewhere. Her prose writing has won the Laurie Lee Prize, been longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize and extracts from her nonfiction Tenderfoot have been published in Caught by the River, Oxford Review of Books, and Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Juliette is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her debut poetry collection Red Handed, was highly commended by the Forward Prizes and a Poetry Society Book of the Year (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Her second collection is forthcoming in 2026.

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