Ms Sarah K. Perry

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds as a teaching assistant in 2021, and was appointed Lecturer in 2022.

I’m currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, where I have been studying part-time since 2018, funded by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (NWCDTP). I obtained my MA in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths College, University of London, as part of the Spoken Word Education Programme. This programme placed working poets into a year-long training and then a year-long residency in a state secondary school to teach creative writing, and to take part in the mental health and wellbeing, extra-curricular, and EAL offers of the school. Beyond this, I’ve worked in the literature and education sectors, as well as in social justice organisations, and as the Global Campaign Manager at PEN International. I obtained my BA in English Literature and Language from the University of Oxford.

My debut novel Let Me Be Like Water (2017) was published by Melville House in the UK and the US (2018), was longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, and selected as Brighton City Reads 2018 pick for the festival. Curious Hands: 24 Hours in Soho - a poetic response to time and place during a residency in Soho - was commissioned and published by Spread the Word. I won the Berlin Writing Prize in 2019. My short story ‘The Treehouse’ was commisioned by BBC Radio 4. I have been a resident artist at The Roundhouse in London, and performed my writing around the world. Whilst at PEN International, I worked on campaigns around Writers in Prison; Writers in Exile or with Refugee Status; and on the Donostia Protocal for Minoritised Language Rights, amongst other things. Recently, I contributed to the Jules Laforgue anthology All Keyboards Are Legitimate (Guillemot Press, 2023), and the short story anthology Permanent Emotion (Valley Press, 2024).

Research interests

My current research asks questions around how crip subjectivities interact with time, affect, and narrative. These questions are both in relation to my processes and affective experiences as a disabled writer, and the crip characters in my fiction. I ask these questions in the context of the worsening climate crisis, and use concepts of decolonial time and crip time to explore how we are (or might be) writing the climate crisis in contemporary fiction. I also explore ideas of practice-research, questioning what that term means in a creative writing context.

My work also engages with writing as or about surveillance; fictional depictions of bodies and intimacy; the writing of sexual and/or domestic violence; deep affect in literary fiction; whiteness; place writing (informed by the land justice movement); and how all of these things are (or might be) charged and informed by intersectional feminisms.

During my recent maternity leave, I ran a pilot project designed to write through the perinatal period from conception to early parenthood. This has become the start of a new investigation developing understanidng around the therapeutic benefits of creative writing.

My past work has explored creative writing as a tool for social justice, mental health care, and political empowerment in community and education settings; writing grief; and lyric fiction writing.

Professional memberships

• National Association of Writers in Education
• Society of Authors

Student education

I teach on the undergraduate and postgraduate Creative Writing courses, as well as supervising postgraduate research.