Dr Patrick Errington

IASH Affiliate 2023-24
Dr Patrick Errington

Dr Patrick James Errington is a Scottish-Canadian poet, translator, and multidisciplinary researcher. He is the author of several works of poetry, including Glean (2018), Field Studies (2019), and, most recently, the swailing (2023), and his writing has won numerous awards, including the Poetry International Prize and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. As a translator, he recently translated the poetry of singer-songwriter PJ Harvey into French, and is currently translating both the French-Algerian painter-poet Hamid Tibouchi’s Veins and the French-Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran’s Notebooks into English. As an academic, Patrick’s research draws together methods from creative practice, literary theory, phenomenology, and cognitive psychology to explore how poetic language is processed, how different reading tasks affect that processing, and the effects of reading on mental health and wellbeing. Having taught at the University of St Andrews, Edinburgh Napier, and the University of Dundee, Patrick is currently a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh.

My research draws together the theories and methodologies from literary scholarship, phenomenology, eco-theory, cognitive psychology, and neuroaesthetics (among others), to explore how a readers’ implicit or explicit goals while reading influence how literature is comprehended. Currently, and in collaboration with colleagues in the Departments of Psychology and Education, we are using behavioural and neuroimaging methods to investigate whether and how the goal of producing literary critical analysis influences the breadth of neural activity (‘embodiment’) involved when reading poems, and how that compares with other ‘creative’ forms of response like imitation, translation, and versioning. We are also exploring whether these different forms of response may offer benefits for adolescent wellbeing and mental health, as well as their possible implications for understanding and responding to ecological precarity.