The Writers of Wales Database

SKOULDING, ZOË

6, Hill Street, Menai Bridge, Anglesey, LL59 5AG
Tel: (01248) 712880
Email: z.skoulding@bangor.ac.uk 
Audiovisual footage available here

Zoë Skoulding has lived in north Wales since 1991, having previously grown up in East Anglia and worked in India. She taught English in Colwyn Bay until 2004. In 2005 she completed a PhD at the University of Wales, Bangor, where she is now AHRC Research Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts in the School of English, and Co-ordinator for part-time literature and writing courses in the College of Education and Lifelong Learning.

She has been involved in several cross–art form collaborations, including Parking Non-Stop, a recording and performance project combining poetry with music and experimental soundscapes. Her work has been translated into French, Bulgarian, Bosnian, German, Norwegian, Slovenian, Czech, Polish and Slovak and has been performed internationally. Her collection The Mirror Trade was published by Seren in 2004. In 2005 she was awarded an Academi bursary to work on Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008).

She launched the literary magazine Skald in 1994 and co-edited it with Ian Davidson from 2002 onwards. In 2008 she became Editor of Poetry Wales. Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008) was on the 2009 Wales Book of the Year Long List.

Reviews:
With respect to The Mirror Trade (Seren, 2004)

“..From The Mirror Trade’s first pages, an intelligent and assured observer emerges from the poetry’s meticulous attention to the larger world, its processes and histories…”
Carrie Etter, New Welsh Review

With respect to Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008)

"…These are mesmerising and unsettling poems. In an unstable world, objects speak a language of constant change. There is a split-second balance; for now the slates hold. The language is, as it needs to be, spare, tough, elegant. Zoë Skoulding brings cool and penetrating insights to disrupt quotidian vision…"
Wendy Mulford


Selected Publications:
Tide Table (Gwasg Pantycelyn, 1998)
Approaches to the Study of Poems by Gillian Clarke (Reflections from the Classroom) (Uned Iaith Genedlaethol Cymru CBAC, 1999)
The Mirror Trade (Seren, 2004)
Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008)
From Here (The Dusie Kollectiv, 2008)

Contributed to:
Dark Wires (co-writer) (West House Books, 2007)

 

Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008)

These vibrant, multi-layered poems create a textual city of monuments, castles, bridges and labyrinths through which the reader is invited to wander. Such visions carry within them both hints of utopia and the seeds of disaster, as the future city is haunted by its ruins. New relationships emerge from the fractures of a shared past and the global communications of the twenty-first century. The historic traumas of European cityscapes emerge in dream and nightmare, but also in the process of rebuilding ’as the vein runs / under fragile reconstructions / of what was holding us together’. As well as testing the notion of the city as a collective identity, these poems present the urban landscape as open to what lies beyond it.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover

Eligible Writers on Tour subjects offered:

1. Read and discuss own poetry
2. Collaborative/multimedia performance
3. Creative writing workshops in poetry

AGE RANGE: Readings: 16 upwards/ adult; workshops any age.