Dr Kerry Featherstone

Pronouns: He/him
  • Programme Lead for MA in Creative Writing and the Writing Industries
  • Lecturer in Creative Writing

Specialism: Creative Writing and Contemporary Travel

Research groups and centres

Publications

Kerry writes poetry, fiction and songs, and has been teaching creative writing in a range of settings for twenty years. He has a wide range of research interests, having published articles about Afghanistan, travel writing and contemporary poetry as well as his own creative work.  He has also translated poetry and fiction from French to English.  He has presented his research at many academic conferences in the UK as well as in France, Germany, Spain, Norway and the US.

 

As well as his academic work he has undertaken public-facing activities such as running workshops in schools and community groups, training teachers and organising festivals.  He was on the board of trustees of Apples and Snakes for fifteen years, including a period as chair.

Kerry’s research focusses on his creative work.  He is a widely-published poet, whose writing has been published in India, Spain and France as well as the UK.  He has also given readings in a wide range of places, including France, as he writes in French as well as English. His creative work often deals with landscape and the relationship that people have with it.  His current work in progress, a novel, also deals with these themes.

Alongside this, Kerry is interested in what happens in the brain during moments of creativity, and how this can be harnessed in the discipline of creative writing. With Barbara Cooke, he has presented research on dopamine and creative writing to conference in Madrid and Oslo, and is working on a publication of these findings.

Kerry’s teaching focusses on creative writing, from first-year undergraduate to dissertations, and includes being programme lead for the MA as well as supervising doctoral research.  Kerry enjoys enabling students to create their first poems and short stories, and then to helping them develop as individual writers. A key aspect of his teaching is employability, both in teaching students about roles in the writing industries, and helping them to benefit from the many transferrable skills that they have gained from studying creative writing.  As well as this, he is always happy to help students to achieve their aspirations with their writing, from performing live to seeing their work published.

Kerry has supervised doctoral research in a range of creative and literary critical areas. His most recent students are:

  • Lottie Hazell, “Swallowing feelings: Examining disclosure in contemporary food-centric fiction” 2023
  • James Barker, “The Things Which No One Can See”, 2023
  • Demi Wilton, “Environmental Displacement and World Literature”, 2024
  • Louise Goswell, “Untangling SOE Narratives Through Historiographic Metafiction”, 2024  

NB.  Lottie Hazell’s creative work became the best-selling novel ‘Piglet’, published by Doubleday in 2023.