Stephen Ely

3 Last updated 9 October 2020.

Dr Steve Ely is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Director of the Ted Hughes Network.  He is an award-winning poet, novelist, and biographer. His most recent publications are Lectio Violant and The European Eel (both 2021). He joined the University in September 2015 after a twenty-year career in secondary education as a teacher, senior leader and Headteacher.  He has also worked as a freelance writer and educational consultant.  He teaches on a range of undergraduate creative writing modules and on the Life Writing MA.  He is currently supervising a number of Masters by Research/PhD students working on creative writing projects (poetry and prose), and projects relating to the work of Ted Hughes.  He would welcome further proposals from prospective students in these areas. Steve is a founding member of the Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) a community-based organisation which seeks to develop the legacy of Ted Hughes in and around Hughes’s childhood home of Mexborough and which runs the annual Ted Hughes Poetry Festival. He also formed the consortium that developed the Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire literary trails  https://discoveringtedhughesyorkshire.co.uk/.  He is currently working on a symphonic, book-length poem, Eely, which explores the Apocalypse of the Anthropocene through the triple foci of autobiography, the European eel and the fenlands of eastern England.  He is also researching a monograph placing Ted Hughes’s writing in the context of World and European movements in art that will characterise his dominant mode as Expressionist.