English at Royal Holloway, University of London

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English at Royal Holloway, University of London Welcome to the page for the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. We are creative and critical. We love literature.

We are readers, writers and researchers. We are readers and writers.

The things we don’t say: Ellipsis, liminality, and narrative uncertaintyThe 2026 David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture is give...
20/10/2026

The things we don’t say: Ellipsis, liminality, and narrative uncertainty

The 2026 David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture is given by the novelist and scholar Dr Marta Pérez-Carbonell, Associate Professor of Spanish at Colgate University.

She will argue that the power of narration in literature lies both in what is found on the page and in the margins; it is what we read and what we conjure up based on what is left unsaid. A classification of absences will be her way into the fictional world of Javier Marías (1951–2022). She then turns to her own fiction, including I Made You Up Inside My Head (translated by Rosalind Harvey), in which a translator on an overnight train from London to Edinburgh becomes engrossed in the stories of the strangers who share her compartment.

10 November 2026, 6.15pm
Founder’s Lecture Theatre, Royal Holloway, Egham
Admission is free, but booking is essential: [email protected]
In-person lecture sponsored by the Centre for Visual Cultures () and Instituto Cervantes London

Final image: René Magritte, L’Empire des lumières, 1953–54, Guggenheim, New York

Tonight at Hatchards, the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom, the Oxford-based painter Tom de Freston launches Poíēsi...
20/10/2026

Tonight at Hatchards, the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom, the Oxford-based painter Tom de Freston launches Poíēsis, his new monograph with Anomie. Our own Dr Matthew Holman wrote the book’s extended essay, ‘Where the River Opens’.

For more than sixteen years de Freston has painted his wife, the novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave. The Poíēsis paintings come out of pregnancy loss and the birth of their daughter, and they answer Titian’s mythologies, from Bacchus leaping towards Ariadne to Europa carried out to sea.

Swipe for the paintings and the Titians they answer.

Where: Hatchards, Piccadilly
When: Tuesday 20 October, 18.00–20.00
At 19.00: speeches and a short Q&A with the artist and Matthew Holman
Who: all welcome, with refreshments

Fifteen months after graduation, where are our writers and linguists now? The Complete University Guide 2027 has the num...
16/10/2026

Fifteen months after graduation, where are our writers and linguists now? The Complete University Guide 2027 has the numbers.

Creative Writing scored 86 out of 100 for graduate outcomes, second only to Earth Science across the whole university. German scored 86 for On Track, the highest of any subject at Royal Holloway.

English and Hispanic Studies sit above the sector average on both measures, and all five of our English and languages subjects rank above it for On Track.

Swipe through for the full picture →

Source: Complete University Guide 2027

Sally Rooney’s novels will no longer be supplied to UK bookshops. Was that the right call?Rooney has said she’ll keep us...
15/10/2026

Sally Rooney’s novels will no longer be supplied to UK bookshops. Was that the right call?

Rooney has said she’ll keep using money from her work to support Palestine Action, which the UK banned as a terrorist group in July 2025. Her publisher, Faber, says the law now stops it passing on her UK earnings, so with her agreement it has stopped supplying her books here. The Supreme Court hears a challenge to the ban next month.

That raises questions worth arguing about. Should a publisher pull books to obey the law? Is breaking the law ever a fair way to protest? Should it be a crime to say you support a banned group? Should a writer’s politics affect whether we can read her work?

Swipe for both sides of each, then tell us where you stand in the comments. Be generous to people who disagree with you.

Thinking of studying English or Law? These are the questions you’ll argue about at university.

Whatever you decide, read the books. Copies already in shops can still be sold.

Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.The Swedish Academy praised her “playful dialogue with the classi...
08/10/2026

Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Swedish Academy praised her “playful dialogue with the classical tradition”. Carson trained as a classicist, and she’s spent four decades turning ancient Greek into new writing: a verse novel about a red winged boy who falls in love with Herakles, and translations of Sappho that leave the holes in the papyrus showing.

Swipe through for four of her books every student should read, and where to start. Which one are you picking up first?

Congratulations, Anne Carson.

Illustration: Lily Qian for The Nation
Photograph: Christopher Sherman for Interview

The quickest way into a new language is across a table.On Thursday, Royal Holloway’s cultural and faith societies take o...
07/10/2026

The quickest way into a new language is across a table.

On Thursday, Royal Holloway’s cultural and faith societies take over the Emily Wilding Davison Building for the Festival of Languages & Culture. There’s food to try and performances to watch. Ask nicely and someone will teach you to say thank you in a language you didn’t have at breakfast.

Hosted by the Students’ Union with teams from across the university, and free for everyone.

📅 Thursday 8 October, 11am-2pm
📍 Emily Wilding Davison (EWD) Building, Egham campus

English and Creative Writing Open Day: ‘I, too, sing America’: Poetry and the Harlem RenaissanceIn July 1920, a young La...
07/10/2026

English and Creative Writing Open Day: ‘I, too, sing America’: Poetry and the Harlem Renaissance

In July 1920, a young Langston Hughes was on a train crossing the Mississippi when he wrote a poem on the back of an envelope. He called it “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and it was published the following year.
Hughes belonged to a generation of Black poets, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen among them, who took the sonnet and the blues and made both do things they’d never done before. Our session takes its title from his poem “I, Too,” Hughes’s answer to Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.”

This session sits across English and Creative Writing, so we’ll read these poems as critics and as writers.

📍 Boilerhouse auditorium, Saturday 10 October
⏰ 12.30-1pm or 3.30-4pm
Booking link in bio.

Creative Writing Open Day: How to Write The Great Gatsby in Four Easy StepsStep one: don’t call it Trimalchio in West Eg...
07/10/2026

Creative Writing Open Day: How to Write The Great Gatsby in Four Easy Steps

Step one: don’t call it Trimalchio in West Egg.

Fitzgerald nearly did. He also tried out Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover, and three weeks before publication he was still cabling his editor to ask if it was too late to switch to Under the Red, White and Blue. It was.
The other three steps are waiting for you at Saturday’s Creative Writing taster session. (Spoiler: none of them are easy.)

📍 Windsor Building, room 1-05, Saturday 10 October
⏰ 11.45am-12.15pm or 2.45-3.15pm

Booking link in bio.

English Open Day: Medieval Dreams and DreamersA man falls asleep by a stream on the Malvern Hills and dreams of a field ...
07/10/2026

English Open Day: Medieval Dreams and Dreamers

A man falls asleep by a stream on the Malvern Hills and dreams of a field full of people, the whole of medieval society packed into one vision.
That’s how Piers Plowman opens. Chaucer uses the same move again and again, sending his narrators to sleep over a book so they can wake up inside one. Medieval readers had a theory for all this: the late Roman writer Macrobius sorted dreams into five types, and only some of them told the truth. Chaucer’s dreamers never quite work out which kind they’ve had.

Find out why medieval writers kept falling asleep on the page at our English taster session this Saturday.

📍 Boilerhouse auditorium, Saturday 10 October
⏰ 11.45am-12.15pm or 2.45-3.15pm
Booking link in bio.

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Department Of English, Royal Holloway University Of London, International Building
Egham
TW200EX

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