PhD student profiles
Aileen Ballantyne
Email: aileen.ballantyne@btopenworld.com
Position:
PhD Candidate (Creative Writing)
Tutor (Scottish Literature 1)
Outline Biography
Aileen Ballantyne has recently begun writing poetry, having been a national newspaper journalist for more than 20 years. She has an MA (Hons) in English Language and Literature and an MSc in Creative Writing, both received from the University of Edinburgh.
After graduating from Edinburgh, she trained as a journalist on The Scotsman, and later moved to The Guardian in London where she worked in Westminster, specialised in criminal policy, and subsequently became medical correspondent. Latterly she moved to The Sunday Times as medical correspondent. Returning to Scotland, she became a freelance medical journalist for several national newspapers. As part of her studies, she is working on her first collection of poetry.
Aileen has also been awarded a number of prizes, such as The Edinburgh University Sloan Prize for poetry; the Reuters Foundation Fellowship at Green College, Oxford – to study medical ethics; the British Press Awards – two separate commendations for investigative journalism; the Medical Journalists' Association Award; and a Scottish Press Award for a series of news and feature articles on Aids in The Sunday Times. More recently, she received a commendation in the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition, 2011 (Commended poem, "Snow Angel" published on 2011 competition website), and won the previously unpublished category in the National Galleries of Scotland competition 2011 (winning poem, "Tusitala", published in The Scotsman).
PhD details
Research Interests:
My main focus in this Creative Writing PhD is on writing a collection of poetry. I would be interested in collaborative projects with illustrators and medical, historical and political researchers as well as other writers. In terms of research, my interest is on the personal and political in the modern sonnet and sonnet sequence and I am looking in particular at aspects of the work of Edwin Morgan, Tony Harrison and Paul Muldoon. My PhD supervisor is Dr Alan Gillis.
Publications
Publications/presentations/papers list for Aileen Ballantyne
This article was published on Mar 23, 2011