Lucy Newlyn was born in 1956 in Kampala, Uganda. She grew up in Leeds, where she attended Bennett Road Primary School and Lawnswood High School, winning an open scholarship to read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1974. She took up her Oxford place in 1975 and graduated with a Congratulatory First in 1978. Her D.Phil. thesis, supervised by Dr Roy Park, was later published as an Oxford English Monograph by Oxford University Press. While working on her doctorate, she held a series of temporary lectureships in various Oxford colleges. In 1984 took up a Stipendiary Lectureship at St Edmund Hall. Two years later, she was elected as the A.C. Cooper Fellow and Tutor in English there – a permanent post which she held in conjunction with a CUF Lecturership in the Oxford English Faculty. Newlyn gained the title Professor of English Language and Literature in 2005. She is Honorary Professor at the University of Aberystwyth, an Advisory Editor of the journal Romanticism, a Fellow of the English Association, and a Patron of the Wordsworth Trust. Following in Bernard O’Donoghue’s footsteps, she has been literary editor of TheOxford Magazine since 2011. She was co-founder, with Stuart Estell, of the , an online resource launched in 2013 for the exchange of writing and discussion of literature and the arts. In 2015, she led the campaign to elect Wole Soyinka as Oxford's next Professor of Poetry. Married to the economist Martin Slater, Lucy Newlyn has two step children and one daughter.
Work
Lucy Newlyn's longstanding research interests are eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, especially poetry and non-fictional prose in the Romantic period; influences on Romanticism; the reception of Romanticism; creativity and multiple authorship; allusion and intertextuality; reader-response and reception theory. She is an expert on Wordsworth and Coleridge, and has published extensively in the field of English Romantic literature, including four books with Oxford University Press and the Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Her book Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize in 2001: 'a signal contribution to British Romantic studies and literary theory'. Newlyn’s more recent research has concerned peripatetic traditions in poetry and prose; nature writing and environmentalism; regional identity and the poetics of place; the theory and practice of life-writing. Since 2003, she has been working on the prose of Edward Thomas. Her edition of his book Oxford came out in 2005. This was followed by several articles on Thomas, as well as Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry, co-edited with Guy Cuthbertson. She is general co-editor of Edward Thomas, Selected Prose Writings, a six-volume edition for Oxford University Press. Together, she and Cuthbertson have edited England and Wales and they are currently co-editing another volume, Pilgrimages. Newlyn has never strayed very far from her first love, English Romanticism, and her most recent book, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other brings together many of her longstanding and recent research interests.
Poetry
As well as an academic, Newlyn is a published poet and anthologist. Her first collection, Ginnel concerns her ‘intense local attachment’ to the streets and alleys of Headingley in Leeds, where she grew up. The collection featured in Woman’s Hour on 1 December 2005, and prompted four paintings by June Berry FRWS, shown in the Royal Watercolour Society’s ‘The Poet and the Painter’ exhibition at Bankside Gallery in November 2008. ‘Baking’ was ‘Highly Commended’ by the judges of the Forward Prize and re-printed in The ForwardBook of Poetry. Poems from the collection have also appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Yorkshire Post, Oxford Today, The English Review, and The Oxford Magazine. A recording of Ginnel, read by Sherry Baines, has been published as a ‘Daisy Book’ CD by the Royal National Institute of Blind People. Newlyn second collection, Earth's Almanac emerged over a fifteen-year period following the untimely death of her sister. In this collection she adapts the form of the 'Shepherd's Calendar' to the phases of grief, condensing a long process of reflection and remembering into the passage of a single year. In addition to her own poetry, Newlyn has published several anthologies of poetry and coordinated a number of collaborative writing projects. Together with Jenny Lewis, she was awarded a grant from Oxford University’s Institute for the Advancement of University Learning in 2002 to undertake research based on workshops at St Edmund Hall. Their findings were published in Synergies: Creative Writing in Academic Practice. Newlyn was poet-in-residence for The Guardian in November 2005. She ran university workshops on ‘The Craft of Writing’ with Christopher Ricks during his tenure as Professor of Poetry; since 2001 she has run regular writing workshops for students at St Edmund Hall.
Memoir
Newlyn's personal experience of Bipolar Disorder is described in her fifteen-year memoir, Diary of a Bipolar Explorer, published by Signal Books in 2018. The book combines poetry with prose, and seeks to de-stigmatise mental illness.
