Shortlisted for the international 2026 Max Nänny Word and Image Prize.
An investigation into the powerful effects occurring at the threshold between articulation and inarticulation in original and translated works, this book models how creative writing research, practice, processes, products and theories can further academic thought. At the threshold of in/articulacy, language can be said to 'thicken' and obscure the usual conditions of legibility or lexical meaning, becoming unfamiliar, flexible, incomplete, even absent. These 'thickening' moments alter and enrich literary processes and texts to initiate a paradigm shift in composition, translation and reading experiences. Interrogating this shift from the viewpoints of writers, translators and readers, Judy Kendall draws on translation studies, literary theory, anthropology, philosophy and physics and more to examine the practices of Semantic Poetry Translation, code-switching, made-up English, visual text, vital materiality and the material-discursive. Breaking new ground with her enactment of the ways in which creative writing can take an active and productive lead in research enquiries, Kendall looks at works including Old English riddles, Nigerian novels, J R. R. Tolkien's and Ursula K. Le Guin's narratives, Caroline Bergvall's hybrid works, Caryl Churchill's The Skriker, Patrick Chamoiseau's novels, Zong! and several other visual texts.
Judy Kendall is Associate Professor (Reader) in Visual Text and Creative Translation at Salford University, UK. She is an award-winning poet and investigates visual and poetic processes in original and translated literary works. Her academic articles, monographs and other writings experiment with methods of academic enquiry that involve reflective, creative and visual modes.
Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, Australia. She was the inaugural director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, and remains a core member of that Centre.
Her main research interest is the relationship between what Pierre Bourdieu termed 'the field of cultural production'-the broad sphere of creative practice-and the social domain, including the political and sociocultural, the practical and the economic, the local and the global. Her current major projects investigate aspects of creativity, and creative production, and the creative producer, and she has been supported in this by several ARC Discovery projects, the most recent of which is So what do you do? Graduates in the Creative and Cultural Industries (DP160101440).
Academics working in the creative field typically have their own creative practice, and Jen's works include lyric and prose poetry, short fictions, and artist books. She is the holder of the inaugural ACT Poet of the Year Award, as well as many other literary awards. She is also the ACT editor for the Australian Book Review's States of Poetry mini-anthologies (2015–2017), chair of the NSW Premier's Literary Award (Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry), and co-editor for the Australasian Association of Writing Program's literary journal, Meniscus.
Jen's recent works include the scholarly volumes Researching Creative Writing (2015), Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (with Caroline Turner; 2016); and the Oxford University Press bibliography entry for Pierre Bourdieu (2017). Her recent volumes of poetry include Stolen Stories, Borrowed Lines (2015), Sentences from the Archive (2016), and Moving Targets (2018). She produced all the photographs for a collaborative poetry/photography volume, with Paul Hetherington: Watching the World (2015). With Paul Hetherington, she is also editor of the bilingual (Chinese/Australian) anthology of poetry, Open Windows: Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016); and of the academic journal Axon: Creative Explorations.
Julienne van Loon is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Melbourne University, Australia and Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include feminist literary practice, contemporary narrative fiction and literary value. Publications include
The Thinking Woman (2020),
Harmless (2014),
Beneath the Bloodwood Tree (2008), and
Road Story (2005). She is managing editor at
TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, see https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/
Bonnie Sunstein is professor of English and education at the University of Iowa, USA, where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Writing in English and Program Chair in English Education. She teaches courses in research, non-fiction writing, American folklore, and English education. She has over thirty years of teaching secondary and college English in New England, where she continues to teach in the summers, at the University of New Hampshire and Northeastern University's Martha's Vineyard Institute on Writing and Teaching.
