.jpg)
Photo by Fiona Melville
Guest Authors Talk Letters:
Karen McCarthy Woolf in conversation
with Jane Yeh
Friday 7 November, 6.00 - 7.00pm
Online (Microsoft Teams)
Tickets: Free
English and Creative Writing at the Open University is delighted to partner with MK Lit Fest to host the grand finale of the department’s international online conference Letters and Literature 1500-2025. In conversation with OU creative writers, guest authors will explore the role letters have played in shaping their own literary lives.
Prize-winning poet and novelist Karen McCarthy Woolf will be talking to the OU’s Jane Yeh about Woolf’s experimental verse novel Top Doll (Dialogue, 2024), a joyfully irreverent tale of the reclusive American heiress Huguette Clark, who died in 2011 at the age of 104, narrated by her vast collection of antique dolls. The story ranges from Park Avenue New York back in time to the slave plantations of Virginia and the palaces of Imperial Japan, via the hedonism of 1930s queer LA.
Woolf will be discussing the role of letters in her archival research for the book, and the congruences between the letter and the journal as literary forms. She will also explore her engagement with the letter as form in her acclaimed poetry collection An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014), which commemorates a son who died in childbirth and examines loss and grief through shifting and unexpected perspectives.
About Karen McCarthy Woolf
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is the author of two poetry collections and editor of numerous anthologies, including Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets (Bloodaxe, 2023), which was nominated for a Sky Arts Award, and Nature Matters (Faber, 2025). A postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA, she was writer in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. Her experimental verse novel, Top Doll (Dialogue, 2024), is an irreverently unreliable biography of a reclusive American heiress narrated by dolls, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Jhalak Prizes. Karen is the winner of the Jerwood Prize for Poetry 2025.
More about Karen:
About Jane Yeh
Jane Yeh was born in the US and has lived in London since 2002. Her collection Discipline (Carcanet, 2019) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was named a Next Generation poet by the PBS for her collection The Ninjas (Carcanet, 2012), and her first collection, Marabou (Carcanet, 2005), was shortlisted for the Forward, Whitbread, and Jerwood Aldeburgh poetry prizes. A Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University, she has been a mentor for the Ledbury Poetry Critics programme and written about fashion, theatre, and sport for various publications.
More about Jane: