The Writers of Wales Database

MARGGRAF TURLEY, RICHARD

Richard Marggraf Turley recently co–authored a collection for Parthian and is a lecturer in the English faculty at Aberystwyth. His main research interests are in Romantic and early Victorian literature, and contemporary poetry. Recent work explores aspects of Romantic literary and political culture, and addresses ideas of language, masculinity and immaturity in the period. Other areas of interest include the work of Bob Dylan and Philip K. Dick. He is co–founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Romantic Studies – the first of its kind in Wales – based in the English Department at Aberystwyth. Richard is also an adept jazz musician. His first solo collection of poetry The Fossil Box (Cinnamon, 2007) received strong support from John Barnie and Robert Minhinnick.

Richard won first prize of £1000 in the prestigious Keats-Shelley Prize for poetry in 2007. A.N. Wilson presented Richard with the award in November 2007 at a ceremony in London. He has previously been short-listed for the Keats-Shelley Prize and nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Poem published in 2006. Richard is a Member of Academi.

Click here to listen to Richard being interviewed and reading a poem on Radio 3’s The Verb (broadcast 2 November 2007). To listen to an audio file of Richard’s prize-winning poem, ’Elisions’, recorded for Telegraph.co.uk, click here, and to read the poem at the Telegraph’s website, click here. For a new, full-length BBC interview about The Fossil-Box, please click here.

Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair (Salt, 2009) was on the 2010 Wales Book of the Year Long List.

Photograph © Leah Marggraf Turley

Selected Publications:
Literary Criticism
Writing Essays: A Guide for Students in English and the Humanities (Routledge Study Guides) (Routledge, 2000)
The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
Keats’s Boyish Imagination (Routledge, 2004)
Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture (Liverpool English Texts and Studies) (Liverpool University Press, 2009)
The Writer in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions (Essays and Studies (D S Brewer, 2011)


Poetry
The Fossil Box (Cinnamon, 2007)
Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair (Salt, 2009)

Contributed to:
The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature (co-editor) (Wayne State University Press, 2006)
Whiteout (co-author) (Parthian, 2006)




The Fossil Box (Cinnamon, 2007)

Poems from The Fossil-Box are focused on Richard Marggraf Turley’s ancestral Forest of Dean, and on the Ceredigion coast where he currently lives. A CD of settings of poems from The Fossil-Box is currently in production, and will be released by Cinnamon Press.

To purchase this title from Cinnamon Press, please click on its cover






Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair (Salt, 2009)

Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair explores the ‘furious stillness’ of love and art. From Chinese legends to scenes from artists’ studios, these poems open apertures on twilit worlds, where the ‘elastic collision of lovers’ burns, ears clang to the ‘torture of air’, and ‘winged creatures quiver on springs’. Here, the voices of old masters and artists’ wives, of holy men ‘huddled round three-legged dings’ and steam engineers dissolve into a curious chorus. In this collection, language seeks to break the ‘well of gravity’ as it ‘tidies the dark.’

To purchase this title from Salt, please click on its cover