‘True North’ Studio

What are we talking about when we talk about the North?

Polar night and midnight sun, melting ice caps, herds of reindeer – or Herdwick sheep, strong tea, limestone cliffs? The idea of the North is a shifting one: just as the Arctic Circle creeps northward every year, so is the poetic idea of ‘northern-ness’ mutable and relative. I want to examine what makes ‘the North’ in the poetry that originates from (and about) it.

Of course, it’s not all dramatic landscapes and pristine snow! I will invite participants to think about the intersections of myth and specificity of detail, the urban north, and (because no compass point really means anything without minds to interpret it) the people in, and of, and out of the North.

Week 1 thinks about northward journeys, landscapes and traditions, including translations from Nordic writers as well as poems based on Norse and Finnic myths (and treatments of them, like Andy Willoughby’s poems inspired by the Kalevala).

Week 2 will consider what ‘north’ might mean geographically or topographically (looking especially at Helen Mort’s recent Greenland poems, collected in Field Notes, which record a changing landscape, and Charlotte Eichler’s Swimming Between Islands).

Week 3 will focus on poets from the north of England (like Zaffar Kunial, Clare Shaw, Sarah Wimbush, and of course Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), and how their location shapes their poetic interests and voices.

Studios are 4-week intensive courses. Reading material will be distributed before the course begins. There are no live chats so they are suitable for both UK & International students.

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concessionary 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, wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, or require any form of adjustment to access our courses, please email [email protected]. For more information visit our Online Courses page.

Image credit: @mariannegayy

About Penny Boxall View Profile

Penny Boxall has held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships at Lucy Cavendish College (University of Cambridge) and the University of York, and is now an RLF Bridge Fellow. Her collections are Ship of the Line (Edwin Morgan Award winner, 2016), Who Goes There?, and In Praise of Hands (with artist Naoko Matsubara, published by the Ashmolean Museum in 2020). She won the 2018 Mslexia/PBS International Women’s Poetry Competition, and has held various fellowships and residencies, including at Merton College (Oxford), Hawthornden Castle, Gladstone’s Library, Cove Park, and Château de Lavigny. She has held UNESCO Cities of Literature residencies in Tartu, Estonia (2022/2023) and Kraków, Poland (2023).

She has taught on the MA in Poetry at Oxford Brookes University, adapted medieval texts with local groups for performance, co-written a play for Magdalen College School (Oxford), and created new works for Bodø European Capital of Culture 2024.

She enjoys working collaboratively, and recently performed Replaying the Tape – a new word/music/tape performance about chance and evolution – with percussionist Jane Boxall and palaeontologist Frankie Dunn. She also writes fiction for children aged 9–12. She received funding from Arts Council England for the development of her debut middle-grade novel, Letty and the Mystery of the Golden Thread, which is published by Puffin in February 2025.

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