Stephanie Norgate
Emeritus Reader
About
Stephanie is a poet, novelist and playwright and former Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow (University of Southampton). She worked at the University of Chichester as Senior Lecturer and then Reader in Creative Writing for twenty-one years. She ran the MA in Creative Writing for many years and enjoys maintaining the connection by returning to give occasional guest sessions to the University’s inspiring writing students.
Fiction
- Her novel Hartisborne, set in 1963 and 1763, was shortlisted for the Cinnamon Literature Award 2024 and was launched at The Festival of Chichester 2025. The novel celebrates the power of writing, the birth of ecology, love in many forms, and the strange slippages of time and presence in a fictional village, loosely and playfully based on Selborne.
Poetry
- Hidden River (Bloodaxe Books, 2008, shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh and Felix Dennis Forward First Collection Awards)
- The Blue Den (Bloodaxe, 2012)
- The Conversation (Bloodaxe, 2021).
- A selection of her poetry was published in Oxford Poets 2000 (Oxford Poets/Carcanet).
- Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines.
- She was awarded a major Arts Council Writer’s grant in 2001 for poetry.
- She has judged many poetry competitions.
- In 2010, she convened a major international poetry conference, Poetry and Voice, at the University of Chichester.
- She has given numerous poetry readings at conferences, festivals and in pubs, art galleries, museums, barns and even in car parks. She frequently works with the South Downs Poetry Festival and reads regularly locally.
Radio Plays
- The Greatest Gift, a one-hour Radio Times Award winning play (Broadcast BBC R4,1989), directed by Peter Kavanagh.
- Clive, a 45-minute play (broadcast BBC R4,1998), directed by David Hunter.
- The Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London, a week-long BBC R4 Woman’s Hour drama series (2003), directed by David Hunter.
As Editor
- Poetry and Voice, A Book of Essays (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), co-edited with Dr Ellie Piddington.
- Chalk Poets, the Winchester Poetry Festival anthology in 2015.
Book Chapters
- She contributed an essay “ ‘The Mind in the House’ or ‘The House in the Mind’: Poetic composition and Reclaimed Memory” to Architectural Space and the Imagination eds. J.Griffiths and A. Hanna (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), which drew on her two-year collaboration with painter Jayne Sandys-Renton and its culmination in a sonnet sequence, The Fallen House and Other Voices recorded to accompany Jayne’s exhibition in the Otter Gallery.
On-location Public Creative Writing Workshops
- Stephanie has given on-location creative writing workshops in places such as the Weald and Downland museum, Cowdray Ruins, Pallant House, Uppark House and Bognor Regis and Portsmouth Library.
- She particularly enjoys place-based writing and was the Otter Gallery poet-in-residence for eight years, where she gave lunch-time workshops to members of the public and the university.
PhD Supervision
- Stephanie has supervised a number of creative writing PhDs to completion as first supervisor including: Dr Sue Evans, Dr Mara Giemza, Dr Hannah Brockbank, Dr Melanie Whipman, Dr Laura Helyer, Dr Mark Floyer.
- She has also supported creative writing PhDs as second supervisor.
Education
- • She has a first-class degree in English and Latin Literature (Warwick University) and subsequently pursued postgraduate research in Ovidian Latin poetry of
the European and English Renaissance at Balliol College, Oxford, where writing poetry took over from critical work.
Other department members
Alison MacLeod
Visiting Professor in Creative Writing
