Trilby Kent

School: College of Humanities
Department: English
Research Centre/Unit: Creative Writing

I am a first-year PhD student and holder of an AHRC Doctoral Studentship.

My critical study, Writing Outside Voices and Outside History, asks: how can the novel utilise 'gothic' imagined places and un-space to explore post-war guilt and social change? What are the challenges of writing about the remote past and creating believable imagined landscapes? What is the relationship between these lost worlds and the remote inner landscapes of “outsider” characters (paying particular attention to the adolescent voice in fiction and the relationship between girls/women and island landscapes)? What role can we ascribe to female characters in literatures dealing with foreignness and destabilizing encounters with the "Other"?

As an undergraduate at Oxford University (History BA), I chose Special and Further Subjects in the Indian Nationalist Movement and The Middle East in the Age of Justinian. After graduating in 2004, I moved on to the London School of Economics, where I completed an MSc in Social Anthropology. My Masters dissertation took as its subject race relations in early colonial South Africa and featured a discussion of André Brink’s imaginative projection of complex racial values in his novel, Devil’s Valley. Many of the themes addressed in this dissertation will continue to figure significantly in my PhD research.

As a writer, I have contributed essays and interviews to such literary journals as The London Magazine and Slightly Foxed, short fiction to The African American Review and Mslexia, and articles to the Canadian national press and publications in Europe and North America. In July 2010 I was shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Competition. I am the author of a historical novel for children, Medina Hill, which was published in Canada and the U.S. in 2009. A second, Stones For My Father, will appear in 2011, as will my first novel for adults, Smoke Portrait, which is to be published in the U.K. by Alma Books.