Rachel Long, Arvon at Home Writer in Residence for Spring 2022 | Arvon

Rachel Long, Arvon at Home Writer in Residence for Spring 2022

Love, sex, fatherhood, football, formal experimentation, and shame…

As a bold statement that Arvon’s online courses are here to stay, we invited Rachel Long to become our first Arvon at Home virtual Writer in Residence, programming a season of online events for Arvon, which launches on 26th October. Rachel is bringing a star-studded selection of authors through our virtual doors, many of whom will be teaching for Arvon the first time.

Rachel: “It has been my great pleasure to curate a suite of spring courses, masterclasses, readings, and conversations on themes close to my heart and by writers I admire hugely. From Kim Addonizio and Caroline Bird’s poetry course On/In Love: writing the heart in all its beauty and bludgeoned complexity; Natasha Brown’s Experimental Fiction Masterclass, a literary laboratory of testing form and language; a Poetry Weekend on the theme of shame and how to commit it effectually to the page with myself and Richard Scott; a reading with Jack Underwood from his latest collection, A Year in the New Life (Faber, 2021), exploring fatherhood, masculinity, vulnerability and the galaxy; a very special You are a Champion Masterclass for Children and Young People (and football fans who might like to write!) with You Are a Champion co-author, Carl Anka; to an evening of real talk on Writing the Ex with myself and Morgan Parker – a (no doubt giggly-groaning) conversation reimagining why he never called back.

Each of these writers changed the way I read, write, commune with, and process the world, from deepening the ways to communicate the often impossibly complex feelings of love, sex, and shame, to how to uplift young people through writing, sport and community. Each one of the writers here is an innovator, opening up new ways of being and of writing. I am proud of this programme, grateful to Arvon for inviting me to curate it, and I am excited about how each of these writers’ extraordinary offerings will affect the yet unwritten.”

Rachel Long
Rachel Long’s debut collection, My Darling from the Lions (Picador 2020/ Tin House 2021) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Costa Book Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the Jhalak Prize. She is the founder of Octavia Poetry Collective for women of colour, housed at the Southbank Centre in London.