- Send email
- DR Hub - Morag Bell Building
In 2024 Michael won the Overton Poetry Prize and was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. His work has been featured in magazines including Poetry Salzburg, Finished Creatures, Magma, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, The North and Poetry News. His first collection, Where Grown Men Go, was published by Salt in 2019. In 2017 he was awarded a New Writing North Award.
He has recently completed an MPhil at Newcastle University where his research focused on the Scottish poet, John Glenday and uncertainty in lyric. His poem, Coastal Home, was selected by Imtiaz Dharker to be read at the Chancellor’s inauguration ceremony in 2022.
Michael won the Chancellor’s poetry prize for a second time in 2023. Subsequently (2023) he won the Art and Law Poetry Prize at the University for which his poem, Act, was installed into the permanent architecture of the Law building at Newcastle University.
Poets’ Flu: : Is Poetry Therapy or Symptom?
PGR Supervisors: Dr Sara Read and DR Anne Marie Beller
I am proposing to undertake a practice-led study of the incidence of a dialectical relationship between poetry and mental health (particularly clinical depression). In so doing it is important to acknowledge the various and longstanding stereotypes that have evolved in our literary culture perhaps fuelled, in part at least, by the biographies of certain historical poets. These include John Clare, William Cowper, Sylvia Plath and more recently, Les Murray, all of whom are understood to have suffered bouts of poor mental health. These stereotypes include assumptions that there is an intrinsic relationship between “madness” and “genius”.
My research is not intended to confirm these hypotheses but rather to challenge the notion that a form of “madness” is necessary to write great poetry. It is the case that poets such as Cowper did not acknowledge the link. As Roy Porter commented: ‘Never [did] Cowper entertain the slightest fantasy that madness confers on him great poetic powers. He wrote to keep madness away […] madness and the muse were essentially at odds…’. The creative component of the research project (my poetry) will enable me to explore these questions concerning the relationship between creativity and mental wellbeing through practice. The research questions that I pose are necessarily the same for both creative and critical elements of the study.
Collection: Where Grown Men Go (Salt, 2019), Pamphlets: Our Fathers (Loughborough University,(2024), Right of Way (Maytree, 2023), Locations for a Soul (Templar, 2016), Undersong (Eyewear 2014). Academic essay: A Defence of the Dispensable (NCLA, 2021)