Dr Patrick Errington

Lecturer | Programme Director, MSc Creative Writing

Biography

Background

Dr Patrick James Errington is a Canadian-born poet, critic, translator, and academic. His poems appear regularly in magazines, journals, and anthologies such as The Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Best New Poets, Best New British and Irish Poets, Poets.org, Oxford Poetry, Copper Nickel, West Branch, and others. His work has also won or been commended for a number of international prizes, including The National Poetry Competition, the Wigtown Poetry Competition, The London Magazine Poetry Competition, the McLellan Poetry Prize, the Plough Prize, and the Poetry International Prize. Patrick was the recipient of the 2020 Callan Gordon Award from the Scottish Book Trust and the 2022 winner of the prestigious RBC Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writers' Trust of Canada.  Patrick is the author of three collections of poems, Glean (ignitionpress, 2018), Field Studies (Clutag Press, 2019), and The Swailing (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023), which was shortlisted for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year in the Scottish National Book Awards, and won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Meanwhile his French translation of PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphey’s The Hollow of the Hand was released by Éditions l’Âge d’Homme in 2017. Further translations, of French-Romanian poet Hamid Tibouchi and the French philosopher E. M. Cioran's Notebooks 1957–1972 are forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books and New York Review Books respectively. In addition, Patrick has worked in an editorial capacity for several publications, including The New Yorker, The Columbia Journal, and The Scores, and his critical writing appears in magazines like Poetry London and The Compass.

Patrick's current academic research is distinctly interdisciplinary and collaborative, blending literary theory, cognitive psychology, phenomenological, ecological, and linguistic philosophy, translation theory, and creative writing to explore other-than-critical modes of literary response, their effects on the reading process, and their potential to expand humanities study and impact mental health.

A graduate of the University of Alberta (BA, 2011), where he studied under Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Patrick also holds an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in writing and literary translation from Columbia University (2015) and a PhD for his research in literary theory and enactive cognition under Profs John Burnside and Don Paterson at the University of St Andrews (2018). He has taught literature, literary theory, and creative writing at Columbia University and at numerous universities around Scotland, including Edinburgh Napier, the University of Dundee, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Edinburgh. 

(Photo credit: Laura Meek)

Qualifications

PhD, Poetic Theory, University of St Andrews

MFA, Creative Writing and Literary Translation, Columbia University

BA, English Literature, University of Alberta

Undergraduate teaching

Creative Writing (prose and poetry); English and Scottish literatures and literary studies.

Postgraduate teaching

MSc Creative Writing; MSc Literature and Modernity; MSc Translation Studies

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

No

Areas of interest for supervision

I am interested in supervising creative writing, literary studies, and transdisciplinary doctoral projects relating to any of my current research areas.

Current PhD students supervised

Liam-Lucille Wright

Ali Graham

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Research summary

My current projects look to theorise, evaluate, and put into practice other-than-analytic modes of knowledge production and readerly engagement with modern/contemporary literary texts based on a transdisciplinary and collaborative research programme that blends literary theory, cognitive psychology, linguistics, mental health psychology phenomenological, ecological, and linguistic philosophies, creative writing, and translation theory, as well as through my own creative practices.

Current research interests

Enactive/embodied cognition; Other-than-critical knowledge-making; Literary metaphor comprehension; Affect theory and narrative; Gestalt theory; Postcritique; Mental health psychology; Ecological theory; Fragmentary narrative forms; Contemporary ecological poetry; Confessional poetry; Erasure, blackout, centos and other forms of responsive writing; Translation

Project activity

I am currently PI on a a series of research projects using neuroimaging, including fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy), behavioural psychology, and community participatory methods to examine the effect of reader mindsets produced by by post-reading tasks (including literary critical analysis, performance, or creative response), how mindsets shape the experience of reading poetry, and how these may shape literacy engagement and mental wellbeing. I am also a co-I on a Wellcome Trust Mental Health Data Prize project examining the effects of reading on adolescent mental health and developing a tool to aid this analysis, as well as PI on related Wellcome Trust iTPA grants seeking to develop and test a digital reading/writing tool to support young people's mental wellbeing and literacy.

Meanwhile, I am currently working on a translation of philosopher E.M. Cioran's nonfiction Notebooks for New York Review Books, a translation of French-Algerian artist and poet Hamid Tibouchi's poetry, as well as a new poetry manuscript and a research monograph on the role of other-than-critical knowledge-making practices for understanding literature.

Current project grants

Wellcome Trust Institutional Translation Partnership Award Accelerator Award: 'Methods, materials, and prototype development of Re:Writer poetry app to support young peoples' literacy and mental wellbeing'
PI: Patrick Errington; Co-Is: Dan Mirman, Sarah McGeown; RA: Simon Boyle
Project Partners: The Poetry Society, The National Literacy Trust, Playable Technology

Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant: 'A multidisciplinary examination of the effect of reading tasks on poetic language processing'
PI: Patrick Errington; Co-I: Dan Mirman; RA: Nicola Burns

Wellcome Trust Mental Health Data Prize, Sustainability Phase: 'Developing a counterfactual analysis digital tool to illuminate active ingredients in mental health’
PI Aja Murray; Co-Is Patrick Errington, Dan Mirman, Josiah King, Ingrid Obsuth, Marie Allitt

Past project grants

Wellcome Trust iTPA Translation Innovation Competition: ‘Engaging users in the development of a creative ‘re-reading’ intervention for adolescents with anxiety and depression’
PI: Patrick Errington; Co-Is: Aja Murray, Dan Mirman, Marie Allitt, Ingrid Obsuth.

Wellcome Trust Mental Health Data Prize, Prototyping Phase: 'Developing a counterfactual analysis digital tool to illuminate active ingredients in mental health’
PI Aja Murray; Co-Is Patrick Errington, Dan Mirman, Josiah King, Ingrid Obsuth, Marie Allitt

CAHSS Challenge Investment Fund: 'Difficulty and Pleasure in the Comprehension of Variously Novel, Verb-Based Metaphors Using fNIRS'
PI: Patrick Errington; Co-I: Dan Mirman; RA: Melissa Thye

Wellcome Trust Mental Health Data Prize, Discovery Phase: 'Developing a counterfactual tool to illuminate the role of reading for pleasure in mental health'
PI: Aja Murray; Co-Is: Patrick Errington, Marie Allitt, Ingrid Obsuth, Dan Mirman; RAs: Helen Wright, Yi Yang, Zhuoni Xiao, Xinxin Zhu.

CAHSS Research Adaptation Fund: 'Difficult Language: Assessing Difficulty and Pleasure in the Comprehension of Literary Metaphors'
Co-I: Dan Mirman; RA: Melissa Thye
Papers: Errington PJ, Thye M, Mirman D (2022) Difficulty and pleasure in the comprehension of verb-based metaphor sentences: A behavioral study. PLoS ONE 17(2): e0263781. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263781
Errington, P. J, Thye, M., Tao, A., & Mirman, D. (2024). Effects of ease of comprehension and individual differences on the pleasure experienced while reading novelized verb-based metaphors. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2531w7kx

Conference details

 

 

Papers delivered

'The Sweet Spot: The "Optimal" Defamiliarisation of Verb-Based Metaphors' | Annual British Society of Literature and Science Conference, University of Manchester | April 2022

'Useless Literature: Responding-To and Responding-With' | Uses of Literature Conference, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark / Online | November 2021

'Beyond Critical: A Cognitive Case for Responding with Poetry’ | Cognitive Futures in the Humanities, University of Kent, Canterbury | July 2018

‘In Kind: How a Co-Creative Response Encourages an Enactive Reading of Poetry’ | Educational Role of Language III, University of Educational Sciences, Vilnius | June 2018

‘The Art of Translation’ | 24th International Conference for Europeanists: Sustainability & Transformation, Council for European Studies and University of Glasgow, Glasgow | July 2017

‘Immersive Poetics: Creative Response Writing as an Enactive Approach to Poetry’ | English Shared Futures, University of Newcastle, Newcastle | July 2017

‘Body in Mind: Poetry and the Re-Embodiment of Abstract Thought’ | Contemporary Poetry: Thinking & Feeling, University of Plymouth | May 2016

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