Thank you for taking the time to visit our JustGiving page in aid of the Bill Overton Memorial Fund.

Bill Overton, who was Professor of Literary Studies at Loughborough, died in early September 2012 after a period of illness. Bill was appointed as a Lecturer in the Department in 1976, and from 1988-93 was its Head. Promoted to Reader in 1998, and to Professor of Literary Studies in 2003, he was a world-respected scholar; his most recent books included Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684-1890 (2002), and The Eighteenth-century British Verse Epistle (2007). As all his students would testify, he was a passionately committed and effective teacher, pioneering the department’s teaching of literary theory and, in more recent years, poetry, and leading its work in eighteenth-century and European literary studies.

To commemorate Bill’s love of poetry, we set up the Bill Overton Memorial Fund, which supports an annual poetry prize in Bill’s name and helps to establish an early-career Poet in Residence at the university.

The inaugural prize, in 2014, attracted over 50 entries, from all over the world: England, Europe, Australia and the USA.   The entries were read anonymously, the winning series written by a poet living in Charnwood – Carol Rowntree Jones.  Her work is about to be published as a poetry pamphlet by our student-led publishing venture, Lamplight Press. 

Thanks to the entry fees and generous gifts from people who remember Bill, we have also been able to ask Sarah Kelly to be poet in residence.  Sarah is a widely-published poet, as well as being an artisanal paper maker; she often combines poetry and paper-making to make experimental work.  She was delighted to find out that the School of the Arts has a paper-making workshop.

A number of students from across the School are having one-to-one meetings with Sarah to talk about their writing and to ask about her experience of working freelance in the arts.  Later this spring, Sarah will be our guest at the Loughborough Literary Salon, which will be on the subject of ‘The Return of the Book’.

This year’s poetry competition has been launched, and the first entries have arrived.  We look forward to reading them, and to inviting next year’s poet in residence to come and work with the students.  We hope that Bill would have approved.

More details about this year's poetry competition can be found here: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/english-drama/events/overton-poetry-prize-.html