•    KEY HIGHLIGHTS
•    ARCHIVE LED TEACHING
•    STUDENT PLACEMENTS
•    ENQUIRIES - TOPICS AND THEMES 
•    STATISTICS - VISITS AND ENQUIRIES

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

Lee Child Symposium /In Conversation and Exhibition, 31 March

An in-person event was held to mark 25 years since the publication of the first Jack Reacher novel. LDC and the BACW hosted the event which explored Child’s legacy and the evolution of the crime novel over the past 75 years. It also marked the official launch of his archive, a gift to UEA.

Creative-critical academic panel events were held throughout the day and included speakers: Heather Martin, Ayo Onatade, Gill Plain, Elspeth Latimer, Jacob Rollinson, Henry Sutton and Tom Benn. The daytime symposium attracted 85 attendees.

A public event in the evening attracted 305 guests, ‘Landmark and Legacy’ saw Lee Child in conversation with his long-term fan, Margaret Drabble, chaired by writer and lecturer Richard Beard, another fan of Child’s. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Vice Chancellor, with a speech from Pro VC Professor Sarah Barrow.

An exhibition from his literary archive was also on display, showing the first pencil drafts of his debut novel, Killing Floor, editorial correspondence with his literary agent, alongside fan letters from presidents Clinton and Obama.

Lee Child Archive and Symposium
ITV Anglia News coverage: furious-betrayed-and-angry-how-itv-sacking-fuelled-jack-reacher-creator

Pictured: Lee Child (second left) signing a book for LDC student Linda Temienor-Vincent, LDC student and event co-ordinator (second right). Heather Martin, biographer (left), and Kat Downes, Conference Co-ordinator, Public Engagement and Events team (right). Photo: Simon Buck.

Innovation and Impact Awards 2022

The Future and Form of Literature project, celebrating 50 years of Creative Writing at UEA is this year’s winner of the prestigious Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement.

One of the six creative works or strands of the project was Where do Stories Come From – a creative collaboration involving the BACW, the author Tash Aw, and a wider team of creative and technical talent. Together they created an immersive digital experience exploring the creative writing process in a digital environment. In addition, the BACW hosted a series of public creative writing workshops to encourage new writers.

Future and Form
’Where do Stories Come From?’ 
List of the finalists in all categories 

Snoo Wilson Prize for Scriptwriting

This annual award ceremony took place at The Garage, Norwich on 17 March. The evening included performed readings of shortlisted scripts from talented UG and PG LDC students. The winners were: Caitlin Jacobson for the undergraduate prize with Sea Glass, and Lacey Austin for the postgraduate prize with We Begin Where We End.

Undergraduate Prize: 
Caitlin Jacobson - Sea Glass [winner]
a moving coming of age drama screenplay set in Northern Ireland 
Ashleigh Strain - Frontline Darlings [shortlisted]
a stirring and strangely timely theatrical and musical account of the experience of Soviet women in World War Two

Postgraduate Prize:
Lacey Austin - We Begin Where We End [winner]
a haunting film tracking survival in a broken world
Lindsay Sharman - Ghosted [shortlisted]
a thrilling and sinister gaslighting audio drama between two women in a remote setting

Our Archive holds the papers of the late Snoo Wilson (UEA graduate, playwright and screenwriter).

ARCHIVE LED TEACHING

PGT: Cultural Heritage (Preservation), 22 February
Students were presented with an insight into the complexities of archiving born digital archive material in the archives of contemporary writers. 18 students.

MA Cultural Heritage, 24 February
A seminar highlighting various approaches to curation and the archive, including community involvement in curation and interpretation. Case studies of the following exhibitions were used: Suffragette Stories, Doris Lessing 100 and Future and Form exhibitions. 10 students.

MA Contemporary Fiction, 24 March
Students were introduced to the Tash Aw Archive and in particular draft manuscripts relating to his novel, We the Survivors specially deposited for the study of this text as part of the Contemporary Fiction module. 17 students.

VISITING FELLOWS

In January we welcomed inaugural Archives & Special Collection’s Visiting Fellow, Jacob Bloomfield, Zukunftskolleg Postdoc Fellow, University of Konstanz. Jacob's research is situated primarily in the fields of Cultural History, the History of Sexuality, and Gender History. He worked with our theatre collections over a period of 4 weeks.

Danielle Hewitt, Artist and Architectural Historian from Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, joined us in March to research the WWII archives of Solly Zuckerman and his studies into the effect of blasts & neurosis amongst the population exposed to bombing.

STUDENT PLACEMENTS

Linda Temienor-Vincent an MA Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) student worked as Event Co-ordinator for the Lee Child Symposium from Jan 2022-March 2022. Linda (pictured above with Lee Child) made a significant contribution through a variety of activities including marketing and publicity. She also participated in the round table event during the Symposium itself.

ENQUIRIES - TOPICS AND THEMES 

BACW COLLECTIONS

AP WATT Lady Gwendolen Cecil TASH AW ‘We, the Survivors’ CHARLES PICK Anita Desai DORIS LESSING ‘The Golden Notebook’; trauma and memory NAOMI ALDERMAN ‘The Power’ ROGER DEAKIN AND MARK COCKER ARCHIVES Place and landscape writing UEA LIVE Iris Murdoch

OTHER COLLECTIONS

PRITCHARD Isokon flats refurbishment; Kurt Rothfels (Jewish judge and refugee); Henry Morris & Impington Village College UEA COLLECTION Prof. Marcus Dick (Chair of Philosophy); 1971 sit-ins & protest; John Preston (UEA glassblower in CHE).  

STATISTICS - VISITS & ENQUIRIES

Archives: 144 (45 remote): UEA 102; UK 35; Int’l 7
Special Collections: 14