Writer, poet and curator alice hiller began working as a freelance features journalist during the 1980s, covering popular and youth culture. She published a history of the T-Shirt with Ebury Press in 1988. For her PhD at UCL, she explored Anglo-American cultural separation through the lens of transatlantic travel writing. Her poems have been widely published, and her debut, bird of winter, is the PBS Summer Special Commendation. It will come out with Liverpool University Press in May 2021, with a launch on 5 May with Alice Miller and Sarah Westcott.
alice is the creative director for the Estate of Oscar Nemon. Her essay ‘Marking the spaces of our silences’ explores creative responses to trauma, and art as a form of activism. As a critic, alice has reviewed for a range of publications including the FT, TLS and Poetry Review, Poetry London and Magma. She was the founding Reviews Editor for harana poetry. Her response to ‘radicalising the feeling world of the poem’ with Vahni Capildeo, Eugene Ostashevsky and Anita Pati can be read here.
bird of winter responds to alice hiller’s own experience of living through, and making a creative life in the aftermath of, sexual abuse during her 1970s childhood. You can read more about its process and geographies here. In parallel with this, she is working on a prose memoir. Her focus is on creativity as a sphere for resistance, reclamation and transfiguration, realised through experimentation and play.
Exploring words as a form of activism, alice has been running an ongoing ‘saying the difficult thing’ series of interviews through this blog. Her interviewees include Rachael Allen, Shivanee Ramlochan, Linda Gregerson, Pascale Petit, Natalie Linh Bolderson, Romalyn Ante, L. Kiew, Troy Cabida, Arji Manuelpillai, Dean Atta, Belinda Zhawi, Rebecca Tamas, Karen Smith, Yvonne Reddick, and Rachel Long. Will Harris and Rushika Wick are forthcoming.
To extend the possible, and support new voices entering published and performed conversations, in 2018 alice founded a workshop collective to support poets working with difficult materials. Since lockdown, this has generated the Voicing our Silences website. Poets from the collective speak about their work, interview each other, perform poems and set free workshop exercises. More about how this came into being here.
