Rory Waterman

Research areas

Dr Waterman is a widely-published poet and critic. His four full-length poetry collections are: Tonight the Summer's Over (Carcanet, 2013), Sarajevo Roses (Carcanet, 2017), Sweet Nothings (Carcanet, 2020) and Come Here to This Gate (Carcanet in 2024). His first was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award, and he was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize in 2019. He has also published three monographs on modern and contemporary poetry, a volume of essays on the life and work of the 'tramp-poet' W. H. Davies (1871-1940), and several other edited volumes and anthologies, in addition to a great many peer-reviewed and press articles, mainly concerning modern and contemporary literature and culture.

In 2020-21, Dr Waterman co-led the AHRC-funded project 'Poets Respond to Covid-19', establishing partnerships with numerous international arts organisations and UNESCO Cities of Literature. From 2/2024 to 7/2025, he leads the project 'Lincolnshire Folk Tales: Origins, Legacies, Connections, Futures', funded through an AHRC Research Development and Engagement Fellowship. He founded and co-edits the poetry publisher New Walk Editions, which has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards in two categories, and previously founded and edited New Walk magazine (2010-17), an international magazine for poetry and the arts. He convenes the Nottingham Creative Writing Hub, providing publishing and performance opportunities for Creative Writing students alongside some of the finest published authors.

Doctoral projects he has supervised, in Creative Writing and English, across both, and in other areas of Humanities, include:

• As co-supervisor: Kai Northcott, 'Dissociation in Contemporary Literature' (NTU Studentship-funded) (ongoing)
• As Director of Studies: Steve Katon, ‘The Representation and Underrepresentation of Disabled Characters in Contemporary Middle-Grade Children's Literature’ (AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded) (ongoing)
• As Director of Studies: Matt Biggs, ‘Opening the Mystery Box: Literary Puzzles in Contemporary Fiction’ (ongoing)
• As Director of Studies: Lucy Grace, ‘Stories in Stones: Mines, Memory and the Geological Imagination’ (AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded) (ongoing)
• As Director of Studies: Rebecca Bruce, ‘Travels of the Ancient Egyptian Body: From the Tomb to the Museum’ (NTU Studentship-funded) (ongoing)
• As Director of studies: Julie Gardner, ‘Fear and Hope in Contemporary British Women’s Poetry’ (ongoing)
• As Director of Studies: Paul Adey, ‘“Nothing New Under the Sun”: Literary Allusion, Intertextuality and Lyrical Performative Quotation in Hip Hop Lyricism.’ (AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded) (2023)
• As Director of Studies: Drew Collison, ‘Basil Bunting’s The Spoils and Its Legacy’ (2023)
• As co-supervisor:  Panya Banjoko, ‘The Politics of Poetry in Nottingham and the Role of African-Caribbean Writers and Networks in the 1970s and 1980s’ (NTU Studentship-funded) (2022)
• As Director of Studies: Tuesday Shannon, ‘Place Attachment and the Post-Industrial Landscape in the Poetry of Tony Harrison, Ian Parks and Helen Mort: A Critical and Creative Study’ (AHRC Midlands4Cities-funded) (2022)
• As Director of Studies: Alyson Stoneman, ‘Contemporary Poetry, Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding’ (AHRC Midlands3Cities-funded) (2020)
• As Director of Studies: Joanne Dixon, ‘Fitting Manifestations: Epiphany in Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie, Liz Berry and My Own Writing’ (AHRC Midlands3Cities-funded) (2018)
• As co-supervisor: Rebecca Cullen, ‘Mastering Time: Temporality in Contemporary Anglophone Poetry’ (AHRC Midlands3Cities-funded) (2018)
• As co-supervisor: Tony Robinson-Smith, ‘The Dragon Run, a Travel Memoir of Bhutan with Critical Commentary Examining Representation of the Self in Modern Travel Writing’ (2014)

Dr Waterman welcomes research proposals from prospective PhD students working in any of the following areas (among others):

• creative writing, especially poetry and creative nonfiction
• contemporary poetry
• 20th and 21st-century literature
• writing travel / memoir
• class and modern/contemporary writing
• writing and war/conflict
• writing and censorship
• poetic form and formal experimentation
• poetry and travel
• folklore and folk tales
• writing from/about Lincolnshire, the Midlands, the North of England, or Northern Ireland

Dr Waterman is interested, and experienced, in supervising PhDs in Creative Writing, critical and creative writing, and English literature, across a wide range. Some of the recent and ongoing PhD projects he has supervised have focused on: post-industrial Northern landscapes and their impact on contemporary poetry; a contextualisation of Basil Bunting's The Spoils; the poetry of sea level change; archiving Nottingham's black heritage with a focus on poetry; 'mystery-box' fiction; hope and fear in contemporary women's writing; literary intertextuality and allusion in hip hop lyricism; epiphany in contemporary women's poetry; poetry and time. Several have included a substantial creative work, e.g. a collection of poems or a novel; others have been entirely critical in nature.

Press expertise

Dr Waterman has spoken regularly about creative writing, folklore, modern literature, publishing and poetry at various events and in the media (radio, print journalism, television, podcasts). He would be especially happy to talk to the press about modern and contemporary poetry, folklore and contemporary belief, writing, poetry reviewing, poetry/literary publishing, Lincolnshire, or about his own writing/creative practice or critical research.