Guest authors
English and Creative Writing at the Open University is delighted to partner with MK Lit Fest to host the exciting conclusion of the department’s international online conference Letters and Literature 1500-2025. In conversation with OU creative writers, guest authors will explore the role letters have played in shaping their own literary lives.
Karen McCarthy Woolf in conversation with Jane Yeh
Friday 7 November, 6-7pm
Register here.
Acclaimed poet and novelist Karen McCarthy Woolf talks to Open University lecturer Jane Yeh about the role of letters in Woolf’s experimental verse novel Top Doll – a joyfully irreverent tale of the reclusive American heiress Huguette Clark, who died in 2011 at the age of 104, narrated by her vast collection of antique dolls. The story ranges from Park Avenue New York back in time to the slave plantations of Virginia and the palaces of Imperial Japan, via the hedonism of 1930s queer LA.
Woolf will discuss the importance of written correspondence in her archival research for the book, and the congruences between the letter and the journal as literary forms. She will also explore her engagement with the letter as form in her acclaimed poetry collection An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014), which commemorates a son who died in childbirth and examines loss and grief through shifting and unexpected perspectives.
Speaker biographies:
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, DR KAREN McCARTHY WOOLF FRSL is the author of two poetry collections and editor of numerous anthologies, including Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets (Bloodaxe, 2023), which was nominated for a Sky Arts Award, and Nature Matters (Faber, 2025). A postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA, she was writer in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. Her experimental verse novel Top Doll (Dialogue, 2024) is an irreverently unreliable biography of a reclusive American heiress narrated by dolls, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Jhalak Prizes. Karen is the winner of the Jerwood Prize for Poetry 2025.
JANE YEH was born in the US and has lived in London since 2002. Her collection Discipline (Carcanet, 2019) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was named a Next Generation poet by the PBS for her collection The Ninjas (Carcanet, 2012), and her first collection, Marabou (Carcanet, 2005), was shortlisted for the Forward, Whitbread, and Jerwood Aldeburgh poetry prizes. A Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University, she has been a mentor for the Ledbury Poetry Critics programme and written about fashion, theatre, and sport for various publications.
Sigrid Nunez in conversation with Emma Claire Sweeney
Friday 7 November, 8-9pm
Register here.
Sigrid Nunez, one of the USA’s most esteemed and best-selling authors, talks to Open University novelist Emma Claire Sweeney about the letters of Virginia Woolf, and how they inspired her own novel Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, a mock biography of the Woolfs’ tiny pet monkey. She’ll also share with us the story behind the novel’s reissue with a never-before-published letter by Bloomsbury heir, Nigel Nicolson, who knew Leonard and Virginia Woolf well and remembered Mitz.
Letters of a different kind drew a young Nunez into the orbit of celebrated American essayist Susan Sontag. Nunez will reflect on her experience of being hired by Sontag to type her correspondence, and how this quickly transformed into the profound and complex literary mentorship that Nunez recounts in Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.
In a conversation that will roam across centuries, cultures and genres, Nunez will explore what it means to be a writer during the dying days of the literary letter, and what we might stand to lose – or gain – as the form evolves.
Speaker biographies:
SIGRID NUNEZ is the bestselling author of nine novels, a memoir, and a forthcoming collection of short fiction. Her work is published in more than 35 countries.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Nunez has won the National Book Award, the Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Windham Campbell Prize.
The Friend, Nunez’s 2018 novel, is now a film directed by David Siegel and Scott McGehee (2024), starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. Her 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through, has also been adapted. The Room Next Door (2024) is directed by Pedro Almodóvar and stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.
Nunez has written for the likes of The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and London Review of Books.
EMMA CLAIRE SWEENEY is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. She is also co-director of the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio, which offers writing retreats in the Little Goat Barn in North Wales and literary mentorships nationwide. Emma was named as both an Amazon Rising Star and a Hive Rising Writer for her debut novel, Owl Song at Dawn (Legend, 2016), which went on to win Nudge Literary Book of the Year. Emma co-wrote her debut non-fiction book, A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf (Aurum, 2017), with her own friend Emily Midorikawa. In her foreword, Margaret Atwood described the work as a great ‘service to literary history’. Emma has won Society of Authors, Arts Council and Royal Literary Fund awards, and has written for the likes of The Paris Review, TIME, and The Washington Post.
