Dr Eley Williams is a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Fiction) in our Department of English and a multi-award winning writer who was recently selected as one of 20 significant British novelists under 40 byliterary magazine and publisher Granta. Her first novel, The Liar's Dictionary (2020) received critical acclaim and was described as a "virtuoso performance full of charm... a glorious novel" by The Guardian.
Apart from novels Eley has also written short stories, prose, poetry and critical work which has appeared in many publicatons including the London Review of Books, the The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. She also written and read work for BBC Radio 3 and 4 and is frequently asked to judge literary awards for a number of organisations including the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is a fellow. We caught up with Eley to find out more about her, her work and her role at Royal Holloway.
1. Can you tell us about yourself and your role as a lecturer in Creative Writing (Fiction) in the Department of English?
I’ve taught at Royal Holloway since my PhD, and during my time as a member of staff I have led seminars and supervised undergraduate dissertations that covered topics ranging from the short story as a category of contemporary literature, the concepts of ekphrasis and portraiture in fiction, and the tricksy, provocative form of the ‘prose-poem’.
I have also worked alongside writers on the Creative Writing MA on both the poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction pathways. It’s been a delight to see so many of these writers’ projects at different stages over the years and a privilege to be at-hand to discuss questions of narrative, voice, and structure in our workshops and conversations.
2. You have recently been selected by literary magazine and publisher Granta as one of twenty significant British novelists under forty in their Best of Young British Novelists list. Many congratulations! What does this achievement mean to you?
As someone who has always encouraged debate about the value of these lists (let alone the value of ascribing concepts such as ‘young’, ‘British’ and ‘best’ to any kind of writing, or the construction of such a list!) it did feel quite surreal to appear on the index of names. There are many writers on Granta’s previous lists whose books have definitely shaped my ambition as an author, and my awareness of what writing can be and do – such as Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook, Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, or Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers – and it’s certainly encouraging to think that this year’s panel of judges thought my current work shows promise. More than anything, I am aware that this once-in-a-decade list is a distinct marketing exercise for the printed journal Granta; my writing first appeared in print thanks to the existence of journals (such as Stinging Fly, Extra Teeth and the much-missed Ambit) and the dedication of their editors, so it’s interesting to suddenly be part of the ‘industry’ side of the publishing ecosystem in this way. I’m a big fan of many of the works of other authors on the list, including K Patrick, Derek Owusu and Sara Bernstein, and it’s exciting (…and daunting) to meet them through events, readings and festivals organised around the list.
3. What are your aspirations as a novelist?
I never feel too comfortable when discussing plotting novels, so I suppose I aspire to find a way of feeling more at ease with that discomfort! I hope that I will be able to keep writing with some of the same driving principles that brought me to the novel form – to attempt to communicate the simple complexities, recognisable weirdnesses and baffling encounters of an imagined experience through text and characterisation.
4. What are your research interests?
In the past I’ve been focussed on research related to literary hoaxes and lexicography, which ran alongside a persistent interest in so-called ‘nonsense’ literature and writers such as Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear – my next novel is concerned in part with chess and I’m hoping to draw upon the work of both these figures in some way or other to inform its drafts and sketches. In order to answer this question I’ve just checked the folders marked ‘research’ on my desktop currently, and there are documents related to the history of mapmaking, something to do with Morpho butterflies, and Google results about a fictional ‘Feraliminal Lycanthropizer’: this is perhaps indicative of a breadth or diverse array of research interests, or a somewhat scattershot approach to filing it.
5. What are your favourite subjects to lecture on?
I am very happy to talk about the phenomenon of the mountweazel – the name given to fictitious entries that appear in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Why might they appear in otherwise ‘trustworthy’ texts, and who wrote them? These questions formed the basis of my first novel, but riffing upon its themes and contexts in a lecture about authorship and intended audiences can be fun – I hope one of my students will discover a mountweazel in the wild some day, and that they’ll let me know if they do.
6. What or who inspires you at work and outside of work?
Recently when I’ve felt my energy for writing flagging, I’ve been reading past stories and poetry on the ‘online anthology’ Visual Verse. This site was established ten years ago by award-winning author and lecturer Preti Taneja, with whom I was lucky enough to study during our Masters at RHUL. Over this decade the site has invited a global readership to respond to a changing roster of images with their own creative responses, resulting in a true treasure trove of experimental, original and dynamic pieces to be unearthed and enjoyed.
7. How do you like to spend your free time outside of work?
My wife and I have a toddler son and a five-month-old daughter, so when I am not at work I think I am most likely to be in close proximity to either a tambourine, some coloured blocks, or deducing the relative depths and splashability of puddles.