Ellen McWilliams
Ellen McWilliams
Writer and Academic
I write fiction and non-fiction. I am an academic by training and teach in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, but have been working at what I think of as The Other Kind of Writing for two decades. I kept this apprenticeship a secret, following the wisdom of one of the writers I care about most, the essayist and short story writer Maeve Brennan.
I grew up in West Cork, but have lived in England’s West Country for the last twenty years.
I am interested in how we live in the shadows of the past and am especially preoccupied with the power of what the philosopher James Hollis calls ‘the ghosts who run our lives’. My current writing is concerned with buried family histories and how landscapes conceal traumatic histories of colonial violence, revolution and conflict, and in particular how the unusual sunder of Civil War, what Seamus Heaney named ‘neighbourly murder’, unavoidably haunts the present.
My work explores the different forms of careful listening that bring hidden, intergenerational histories to the surface, histories that refuse to rest; Seamus Deane in Reading in the Dark likens these unsettling histories to ‘a shout down a tunnel that echoes and echoes and never really stops’.
My writing is honest about the ethical and emotional struggle involved in excavating painful, concealed histories and addressing wounds that have never been fully exposed to the light or given a chance to heal and is concerned with the relationship between private and public grief and mourning and what the historian Guy Beiner calls 'forgetful remembrance'.
Archives have been at the heart of all of my work as an academic and they have a renewed importance in my writing.
My first book about the aftershocks of suppressed histories, Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution, will be published by Beyond the Pale Books in November 2023.
I am indebted to the Fulbright Programme for a Fulbright Scholar Award, the Arts Council of Ireland for a Writer's Agility Award, and the Society of Authors for a Foundation Award to support the completion of this work and other works in progress.
photo credit: John McWilliams
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