Dr Agnes Lehoczky
School of English
Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing
+44 114 222 8467
Full contact details
School of English
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
- Profile
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I am Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Programme Convenor of Postgraduate Creative Writing, Convenor of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Pathway and Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield.
I studied for my Masters in English and Hungarian Literature at PPKE (PPCU, 1994-2001, Budapest) then completed a Creative Writing MA in Poetry at the University of East Anglia with a distinction in 2006. I obtained a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at UEA in 2011. The AHRC-funded research ran under the supervision of Professor Denise Riley, Dr George Szirtes and Dr Jeremy Noel-Tod where I was also teaching Creative Writing Poetry and Prose modules on the undergraduate programme in 2008-2010. I joined the School of English at the University of Sheffield in September 2010.
My poetry collections published in the UK are Budapest to Babel (Egg Box Publishing, 2008), Rememberer (Egg Box Publishing, 2012), Carillonneur (Shearsman Books, 2014) and Swimming Pool (Shearsman, 2017). I also have three poetry collections in Hungarian published in Budapest: Ikszedik stáció (Universitas, 2000), Medalion (Universitas, 2002) and Palimpszeszt (Magyar Napló, 2015). My new collection Lathe Biosas, or on Dreams & Lies, part of a larger project, was published by Crater Press in 2023. I am the author of the academic monograph on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy Poetry, the Geometry of Living Substance (2011). I was winner of the Jane Martin Prize for Poetry at Girton College, Cambridge, in 2011. My pamphlet Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters was published by Boiler House in May 2017. I co-edited major international anthologies: the Sheffield Anthology; Poems from the City Imagined (Smith / Doorstop, 2012) with Adam Piette, The World Speaking Back to Denise Riley (Boiler House, 2017) with Zoë Skoulding, Wretched Strangers (Boiler House, 2018) with J. T. Welsch and the Monk Collective with Adam Piette (Blackbox Manifold, Issue 29, January 2023). Among other collaborative projects, I recently worked with The Roberts Institute of Art, London. I am Contributing Advisor to Blackbox Manifold.
My work has been anthologized in the UK and Hungary and appeared, among others, in The World Record (Bloodaxe, 2012), Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013), Atlantis (Spirit Duplicator, 2016), The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem; From Baudelaire to Anne Carson (Penguin, 2018), A századelő irodalma (a three-volumed anthology of Hungarian contemporary literature, ed. Gábor Zsille, Magyar Napló, Budapest, 2017), The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (eds. Anne Caldwell & Oz Hardwick, Valley Press, 2019), Archive of the Now (ed. Andrea Brady), Hilson Hilson (a Hilson-collective on the poetry of Jeff Hilson, Crater, 2020), Nothing on Atkins (an Atkins-collective, Crater, 2023) and Carnaval Press’ Disease (eds. Ana Seferovic, Rushika Wick and Virna Teixeira, 2022). My work has been translated into Polish (Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese), Bulgarian (by Nikolai Boikov), French (by Jean Portante & Michel Perquy) and Dutch (by Hans Kloos). My various poems appeared in print and online in the UK, US and Europe: in, among others, English (Oxford Journals), Datableed, PN Review, The Wolf, Blackbox Manifold, Molly Bloom, Confluences Poetiques, Poetry Wales, Para-text, 3:AM Magazine, Kluger Hans, Long Poem Magazine, но поезия /No Poesia, Locomotive Journal, Make It New, Arterie, The Ofi Press, Magyar Napló, Kortárs, Free Verse: a Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Chicago Review and Pamenar Magazine.
Honours and poetry awards
- The Jane Martin National Poetry Prize of Girton College, Cambridge, 2011
- Representative Poet of Hungary: Poetry Parnassus, Southbank Centre, London, 2012
- Bertha Bulcsu-Award (August 2012, Budapest)
- The Arthur Welton Award of the Authors' Foundation/Society of Authors in support of my second collection of poems in English, 2010
- Research interests
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My research focuses on contemporary literature (poetry and also on prose) and within that on hybrid, liminal and experimental formations of writing; on the prose poem, poetic prose, collage, creative non-fiction, memoir, creative translation and other auto-theoretical forms as emerging modes and practices of polyphonic texts; on phenomenology, psychogeography and critical theory as part of a transcultural feminist discourse. I am interested in current methods of writing, in exploring a wide range of forms and experimenting further with genre-fusions and the boundaries of genre conventions. My focus being on language I look at morphing concepts of self and selves, identity as fusion of the private and the public, political and personal, the position of the lyric, or fictional, ‘fused’ and layered I or is, on phenomenological questions in poetry such as the correlation between psyche and world, language and self, inside and outside while I am interested in exploring notions and structures of memory, trauma, movement, documentation, perception, body (psyche) and place and environment, politics, historicity, constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of self, identity and gender, writing as re-writing and as forms of ekphrasis; I focus on ‘unnameables’ – through the lens of the ‘anonymous writer’.
Through this cross-genre experimentation and by looking at notions and structures of identity, perception and consciousness, and also focussing on ‘unnamables’, the ‘difficult’ and ‘tender tissues’ of the writing and writer’s material, the abject, the ‘undisclosed’ I look at liminalities and through that the manipulative and speculative power of and within the contemporary creative text as something always already made, found, speculated, re-invented, (un)documented, de-constructed words of public and private, or even anonymous selves.
I am Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics and run its Sheffield Poetry Series. I am the poetry editor of Route 57 and Blackbox Manifold’s contributing advisor https://blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/
- Publications
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Books
- Lathe Biosas, Or on Dreams and Lies.
- The World Speaking Back...: To Denise Riley. Norwich: Boiler House Press.
- Wretched Strangers: Transnational Poetry. Boiler House Press.
- Swimming Pool. Bristol: Shearsman Books.
- Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters. Boiler House Press.
- Palimpszeszt válogatott és új versek.
- Carillonneur. Bristol: Shearsman Books.
- Rememberer.
- Poetry, the Geometry of the Living Substance: Four Essays on Agnes Nemes Nagy. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- Budapest to Babel.
- Medalion.
- Ikszedik stáció válogatott versek.
Edited books
- The Sheffield Anthology: Poems from the City Imagined. Sheffield: Smith/Dorrstop.
Journal articles
- 'Endnotes on Disobedient Poetries, Paper Citizens, and Other Agoras,' in Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press, 2018). Wretched Strangers, 311-322.
- On the Swimming Pool. English, 64(245), 131-137.
- Scribbling in that other tongue. Poetry Wales, 47(4), 31-32.
- A Book of Breathings. POETRY WALES, 47(4), 33-35.
- Lathe Biosas, Or on Dreams and Lies.
- Teaching activities
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I am Programme Convenor of Postgraduate Creative Writing (MA in Creative Writing) and Convenor of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Pathway which I set up in 2011.
At present, I convene both Undergraduate and Postgraduate Creative Writing within the School of English. At undergraduate Level I convene Level 1 Introduction to Creative Writing (Lit 111); convene and teach Level 2 Creative Writing Poetry 2 (Lit219) and convene and teach Level 3 Creative Writing Poetry 3 (Lit3063). I also supervise Level 3 dissertations in Creative Writing.
I am Programme Convenor of the MA in Creative Writing which I have been running since 2010. I convene and teach Creative Writing: Poetry, Poetics, Fusion (Lit6043) and Creative Writing: Poetry, Prose, Hybrid (Lit6044).
I supervise PhDs in Creative Writing (Poetry, hybrid or experimental writing). For further details about my research please see ‘research’ section.
Along with teaching creative writing, I am also the editor of Route 57’s Poetry Section and I run various other extracurricular creative writing projects at and outside the University of Sheffield.
I am a Fellow of The Higher Education Academy.
See links:
- Further work
- Poetry collections in Hungarian
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- Palimpszeszt (Magyar Napló, Budapest, 2015)
- Medalion (Universitas, 2002)
- Ikszedik stáció (Universitas, Budapest, 2000)
- Journals and anthologies
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My work has been anthologized in the UK and Hungary and appeared, among others, in The World Record (Bloodaxe, 2012), Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013), Atlantis (Spirit Duplicator, 2016), The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem; From Baudelaire to Anne Carson (Penguin, 2018), A századelő irodalma (a three-volumed anthology of Hungarian contemporary literature, ed. Gábor Zsille, Magyar Napló, Budapest, 2017), The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (eds. Anne Caldwell & Oz Hardwick, Valley Press, 2019), Archive of the Now (ed. Andrea Brady), Hilson Hilson (a Hilson-collective on the poetry of Jeff Hilson, ed. Richard Parker, Crater, 2020), Nothing on Atkins (an Atkins-collective, ed. Richard Parker, Crater, 2023) and Carnaval Press’ Disease (eds. Ana Seferovic, Rushika Wick and Virna Teixeira, 2022). My work has been translated into Polish (Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese), Bulgarian (by Nikolai Boikov), French (by Jean Portante & Michel Perquy) and Dutch (by Hans Kloos). My various poems appeared in print and online in the UK, US and Europe: in, among others, English (Oxford Journals), Datableed, PN Review, The Wolf, Blackbox Manifold, Molly Bloom, Confluences Poetiques, Poetry Wales, Para-text, 3:AM Magazine, Kluger Hans, Long Poem Magazine, но поезия /No Poesia, Locomotive Journal, Make It New, Arterie, The Ofi Press, Magyar Napló, Kortárs, Free Verse: a Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Chicago Review and Pamenar Magazine.
- Archival
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- Archive of the Now (ed. Andrea Brady): https://www.archiveofthenow.org/authors/?i=243
- Other works/commissions
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- ‘Apropos a literature of consolation; on building (from/on) nothing conclusive’ in Nothing on Atkins (eds. Richard Parker, Crater Press, 2023), pp142-147.
- ‘Apropos the former Agora on cobbled Paradise Square’ in ‘... a twilight zone. I’m in there of course. In my Shed. We’re all there’, a Monk Collective, Blackbox Manifold, Issue 29 : Winter 2022.
- ‘... a twilight zone. I’m in there of course. In my Shed. We’re all there’, a Monk Collective, Blackbox Manifold, Issue 29 : Winter 2022 (editor and curator): https://blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/
- ‘from On Lathe Biosas, or on Dreams and Lies’ in Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Free Verse – Issue 32 – 2021, November 10, 2021
- ‘From Apropos…’ in Disease (eds. Ana Seferovic, Rushika Wick and Virna Teixeira, Carnaval Press, 2021).
- Fission of Being — Endnotes on Earthbound; Ágnes Lehóczky for Earthbound: Contemporary Landscape from the Roberts Institute of Art, December 2021: https://www.therobertsinstituteofart.com/programme/projects/%C3%A1gnes-leh%C3%B3czky-earthbound-text
- ‘Theorising the Final Poem’ in Hilson Hilson – the Poetry of Jeff Hilson (eds. Richard Parker, Crater Press, 2020) pp141-144.
- Dictionary of Neoliberal Terms, volume 4. This popular dictionary now runs to four volumes, each addressing, critiquing and ridiculing our neoliberal planet: a sphere of conformity, deadening affect, performance management, behaviour control. (Spirit Duplicator, 2020)
- ‘Apropos a Literature….’ + ‘Apropos Self-Contained or Duplex Apartments’ in Pamenar Magazine, 2020. https://www.pamenarpress.com/post/%C3%A1gnes-leh%C3%B3czky
- ‘Intro’ + ‘Pool Epitaph i; letter I:13 …And so on a hot August day’; ‘PE ii; letter II:13; … Dear silent swimmer sans silhouette’ & ‘PE xii; letter XII:13 … Last Sunday you sent me' in MAKE IT NEW, The Ezra Pound Society Magazine, vol. 4, no. 4, SPRING 2018, pp80-85.
- The North by North West Poetry Tour in Sheffield (collab reading with Terry O'Connor and others in Bank Street Arts, February, 2017) Collaborative performance with Terry O'Connor
- No: Swimming pool poem as part of No Performance, theatre performance (Terry O'Connor), performed on the 8th of June, UoS.
- Long Poem Project: Poem in collab with Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese in Long Poem, Summer, 2017 originally performed in Lodz Literary Festival, December 2016.
- Atlantis Project: Poem ('Word One') collaboration with artist Lizzy Stewart) in Atlantis anthology (Spirit Duplicator, June, 2016)
- Enemies Project: Reading with Astrid Alben, Camaradefest II, Rich mix, London, 25th of October, 2014, http://www.weareenemies.com/camaradefestii.html
- A sequence of prose poems on psycho-geographic aspects of Sheffield commissioned by 'Citybooks Sheffield' which is an EU-sponsored project in which the University of Sheffield works closely with the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren in Brussels. Five authors, a photographer and a video artist will create a unique portrait of the city of Sheffield, an alternative travel guide, which will be available in three languages: English, French and Dutch. Sheffield is the UK representative in this web-based project coordinated for Sheffield by Henriette Louwerse, Germanic Studies/SOMLAL.
- ‘Crowded Catacomb…’ a Libretto commissioned by Writers' Centre Norwich and Norwich and Norfolk Festival 2011 (with two other poets: George Szirtes and Andrew McDonnell): The Proportions of the Temple was performed by The Voice Project as a world premiere performance in May 2011, Norwich Cathedral.
- Editorial
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- Lehoczky A (2023) ‘... a twilight zone. I’m in there of course. In my Shed. We’re all there’, a Monk Collective, Blackbox Manifold, Issue 29 : Winter 2022
- Lehoczky A (2018) Wretched Strangers: Transnational Poetry. Boiler House Press (with editorial ‘Endnotes…’ pp311-322).
- Lehoczky A (2018) The World Speaking Back...: To Denise Riley. Norwich: Boiler House Press (with a preface: ‘In Defence of Paradoxes, xi-xviii).
- The Sheffield Anthology, Poems from the City Imagined, eds. Agnes Lehoczky, Adam Piette, Ann Sansom, Peter Sansom (Smith/Doorstop, 2012) https://inpressbooks.co.uk/products/the-sheffield-anthology-poems-from-the-city-imagined
- Wordwards, eds. Adam Piette, Agnes Lehoczky and Matthew Cheeseman, (Mass Observation, 2012)
- Ebenezer Elliott, Corn Law Rhymer: Poems of Sheffield & Environs, eds. Adam Piette and Agnes Lehoczky, foreword by Alan Halsey and Adam Piette (Issue 8, Route 57)
- Route 57, Poetry, Issue 8 (2012-present, published annually)
- Translation
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- Four poems by Attila József, translated by Ágnes Lehóczky and Adam Piette, in: Shearsman Magazine 137-138, October, 2023
- I Killed my Mother - Andras Visky’s play translated by Agnes Lehoczky & Ailisha O'Sullivan (for the Rosemary Branch Theatre Performance, produced by Summer Dialogues Productions and presented in partnership with the Hungarian Cultural Centre and the Romanian Cultural Institute, London, March 2013)
- New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation, ed. George Szirtes (Arc Publications, 2010)
- Poems by Kemény István and Virág Erdős. (Hungarian Quarterly, April 2010)
- Poems and essays by Agnes Nemes Nagy, Zsuzsa Takács, György Somlyó, Imre Korizs and Ákos Gyorffy in Hungarian Literature Online: poems (www.hlo.hu) 2009
- Poems by Lavinia Greenlaw. (Nagyvilág, 2008, Hungary)
- Featuring on radio
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- Kossuth Radio, reading, Hungarian National Radio, 11th of April, National Poetry Day, Budapest, 2016. Kossuth Radio, 10th of April, 2015 / Also (recorded) reading at the Mikroszkop Szinpad/Thalia Theatre Budapest.
- Kossuth Radio, 11th of April, 2014 / Also (recorded) reading at the Thalia Theatre.
- Kossuth Radio, 11th of April, 2013 / Also (recorded) reading at the Mikroszkop Szinpad, Budapest.
- Kossuth Radio, 11th of April, 2012 / Also reading at the Mikroszkop Szinpad, Budapest.
- Magyar Radió 1 (MR1) - Hungarian Main Radio Station 1. National Poetry Day. 8th of April, 2011.
- BBC The Forum - a World of Ideas, with Guy Deutscher and Claude M. Steele - End of June, 2010.