The Writers of Wales Database

ATKINSON, TIFFANY

Email: tsa@aber.ac.uk

Tiffany Atkinson, Critic, Theorist, and lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, was the winner of the 2001 Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition: ’Photo from Belfast’ tells of the author’s brief acquaintance with Michael in a pub on the Queen’s Road, shortly before the boy is killed by a car bomb. Read Tiffany’s prize winning poem, Photo from Belfast here.

Tiffany Atkinson was born in Berlin in 1972 to an army family, and lived in Germany, Cyprus and Britain. After studying English at Birmingham University she started a PhD in 1993 at Cardiff University in Critical Theory, researching Contemporary Writing and Theories of the Body. Tiffany has lived in Wales ever since. She lectures in English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where she also co–hosts a weekly poems and–pints event. Her poetry has appeared widely in magazines.

Her current critical and theoretical projects include a volume of essays for Macmillan on Theories of the Body, and a monograph concerned with Contemporary Theories of Identity.

She has toured widely in Eastern Europe for the British Council, leading both writers’ workshops and academic seminars. Tiffany won the BBC Radio Young Poet of the Year Competition in 1993 and 1994, and the Ottakar’s and Faber Poetry Competition in 2000. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Life, Sampler and The Telegraph. Her latest title Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006) won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Award 2007. It is also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and is currently shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writer’s Award. Tiffany is a Member of Academi.

Selected Publications:
Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006)

Contributed to:
The Body (Readers in Cultural Criticism Series) (editor) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)



Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006)

The poems of Tiffany Atkinson’s debut collection, Kink and Particle, offer us multiple perspectives, including those of a woman on the brink of 30. This crucial birthday is a milestone from which the speaker looks back to childhood experiences, to the more indulgent pleasures of the 20s and then onwards to a mysterious but much-anticipated future. The poet’s style is often an apparently casual, almost ‘throwaway’ vernacular that nevertheless has been formulated with great care. The effect is of intimacy, as if in a letter from a friend, and offers an immediacy, a diary-like quality of authenticity. The author’s eye for quirky detail, observed, recalled and imagined, is especially striking. Her eye and ear for Aberystwyth, the somewhat eccentric coastal university town where she lives, is also entertainingly apt. Her style lends itself particularly well to love poems, several of which are included in Kink and Particle.


To purchase this title from Seren, please click on the front cover