Dr Simon Cooke
Sabbatical Fellow, September - December 2024
Home institution: University of Edinburgh
Simon Cooke is a Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Travellers’ Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald (2013), and has published on writers including Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Muriel Spark. His broad areas of interest include life-writing, literature and secrecy, literary archives, and the relations between the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’. He convenes of the Edinburgh Life-Writing Network, and is a co-convenor of the Edinburgh Network for Studies in Secrecy.
Projects:
As a Sabbatical Fellow, Simon will be working on three linked projects in sequence:
‘All Things Being Equal: Judging Literary Prizes’. This is an essay on the cultural politics of prizes in literature and the arts, drawing on the experience of being a staff judge of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, in the Biography category, from 2019-2024. What do prizes tell us about the way we value the arts? Are prizes, in an emphasis on the win and in their relation to the market, antithetical to that which they seek to honour in the work? How does literary and artistic judgement relate to social or political values in public prize culture?
Parting Words: A novella. The narrator is summoned by an old friend, to whom he harbours a sense of guilt for some advice he gave him half a lifetime ago, and who may now be dying. The friend has failed in his ambitions to write and the narrator, feeling an obscure responsibility, accepts the friend’s request to go over his archive of unfinished projects and make something of them. The narrative concerns ideas of success and failure, friendship, influence, intellectual property, and facing death. It’s an experiment with voice, and a sort of ghost story.
Baba Yaga's Library: Reading, Writing, and Literary Gifts
This is an autobiographically inflected exploration of books as gifts - the cultural history of book-gifting, and the theme of gifts, givens, and giftedness in literature, with twelve chapters, each gravitating around a particular book, or situation of reading. These range from early childhood reading (and being read to), through reading for a prize (the essay above is linked to one of the chapters in the book), to reading 'Genesis' in a Chapel of Rest.