To those of you who flounder at your laptops wondering whether your slavish ly crafted pataphor is all for nothing, there remains hope. I sought out Samantha Shannon Jones, our very own English undergrad, who has just been offered a book deal w ith none other than Bloomsbu ry publishers for the first t hree novels of her series, the first titled The Bone Season.

Samantha is an unassuming interviewee. She doesn’t cast herself as the next Rowling or Atwood (both published by the same publishing house as Jones) but rather admits that whilst she ‘always wanted to be a famous author’, she simply finds the whole process ‘exciting’ and hopes that ‘people will love my characters as much as I do.’

Samantha began to write when she was thirteen, ‘little stories and a first novel’ which unfortunately remain unpublished. At Oxford she began work on The Bone Season during her prelims and found the whole process easier than her first attempt because ‘once I had the story in my mind I thought that this was going somewhere, that this would be a story that would work.’

The story is a ‘dystopian urban fantasy’ with ‘elements of the supernatural’ which was inspired by the Salem witch hunts. The protagonist is a clairvoyant, persecuted for her gift. Samantha thinks that it is ‘outside other genres, because it is so many genres mixed together. I hope it will be different and exciting.’

I wonder whether her time at Oxford has proved formative or challenging to her writing and she admits that whilst it has all been a ‘whirlwind’, her studies in Victorian and Middle English literature have been particularly inspiring and have informed her work positively. But she does admit that she has had to ‘sacrifice’ the student social scene to a certain extent in order to foster her talent.

Finally I ask, ‘if you could go on a writer’s retreat with any author alive or dead, who would it be and where would you go?’ Samantha laughs and replies, ‘The Yorkshire moors with Emily Bronte; or a city with Margaret Atwood to get the dystopian perspective on it.’ With that we wrap up: Samantha to tinker with her novels, I to lean head in hands and wonder ‘what have I been doing with my life til now?’

Spend long enough with one of our English undergrads and sooner or later they’ll probably inform you, in hushed and reverent tones, that ‘Tolkien – can you believe it? Tolkien!’ wrote his epic fantasy novels in the Eagle and Child on Woodstock road. But Oxford is not only the progenitor of creative inspiration, but the subject of it. Right from its famous and florid evocation in Brideshead Revisited to an innumerable number of crime novels and thrillers, Oxford has appeared in literary works across the genres and centuries.

A Victorian conjuration of our beloved University was aptly titled The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green. Edward Green’s 1899 novel charts the experiences of naive undergraduate Verdant Green who is the butt of numerous student pranks, gets involved with fights between ‘town and gown’, and has many a night when ‘he kept the spirits up by pouring spirit down’.

This devil-may-care attitude is re-examined in high literary style in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in which Oxford appears as a city which ‘exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth’. In this novel the innocent student Charles attends Hertford college and his initiator into a world of immoral moneyed aesthetes is Sebastian of – surprise, surprise – Christ Church. This novel proved so popular and influential that it sparked a whole series of fictional works emulating its narrative.

Most recently, Naomi Alderman’s 2010 novel The Lessons charts the story of an impressionable Physics fresher whose time at Oxford introduces him to a lifestyle of leisurely debauchery which
stands him in poor stead for theboring years following his graduation.

Highly romantic dissipation, it seems, is a common trope of the Oxford-centric novel and our own essay crises and alcoholic indulgence take on a veneer of respectability when you comfortingly recall that such situations have been the idealised fodder of creatives for generations.

But the same does not apply for the other favourite literary treatment of our beloved university town. Murder mysteries and crime thrillers are frequently situated amongst our hallowed halls. One entertaining offering is the amusingly titled Landscape with Dead Dons by Robert Robinson which is set in fifties Oxford. A series of murders sends the Oxford Dons into a satirically rendered panic and, in a memorable scene, a collection of them charge au naturel through the city centre.

Finally, it is an unusual undergraduate who has not tasted the delights of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. In a lesser known short story Lyra’s Oxford, Pullman presents a magical version
of our city through which Lyra must travel on a mission to unite a witch’s daemon and a mysterious alchemist who lives in Jericho.

Oxford has appeared in all sorts of guises: the home of desperate bands of youthful revellers, the scene of numerous brutal crimes, and a brilliantly uncanny rendition which reconfigures it as the home of an alternative universe of intellectuals, children and daemons. One thing that is certain, though, is that this long-lived literary love affair is far from over.

What do you write? Poetry.

Why do you write it? Because I don’t think I’m brave enough to do anything else that might change people’s points of view. And it’s fun.

Inspirations and influences? Selima Hill, Clare Pollard, John Donne, Dylan Thomas, The Smashing Pumpkins, the Terminator Films, Jonathan Lyon, tabloid news stories, woodcuts, accounts of captivity by savages, grimoires.

Where can we see your work? Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, which is in Blackwells. Most of that is old and crusty and I wrote it at school. You can Google me, if you promise not to laugh. I have a debut collection which is out soon on Luke Wright’s Nasty Little Press.

Has your work been featured anywhere? The Guardian, and a bunch of ‘zines: Pomegranate, Rising, Magma, FuseLit, Cake, Cadaverine.Most of them have silly names. I performed at Latitude. I was really stoned, but pulled it off. I think.

Working on anything great? I’d sound like a bit of a dick if I said yes. I’m writing.

How has your writing developed and what about it’s future? Yeah, there’s a lot less ex-boyfriend bile now. In exam rubric terms, I’m engaging with the question more fully. I could see my poems getting longer in the future.

How supportive and fertile is Oxford as a space for creative writing? You can’t write unless you’re reading, so in that sense it’s perfect. There are lots of opportunities to be published, also. The only problem, I think, is that I’m a page poet, not a performance poet, and a lot of open mic things aren’t my cup of tea. I can’t do the rapping, commentary- on-the-status-quo hing. I’m pale and awkward and would rather stay inside.

What do you write? Poetry, prose, experimental theatre, and journalistic pieces.

Why do you write it? I write because to be a writer you should write. Most people who say they want to be writers don’t actually write. I don’t want to be one of those people. I want to write through the bad writing and get to the goods.

Inspirations and influences? Bernardine Evaristo, Kate Mosse, Paul Muldoon, Issac Asimov, Will Self, Steve Reich, Soul, Funk and Hip-Hop.

Where can we see your work? Waterstones in 7 years time (if they’re still going). Some illegal TV/Movie website if I’m lucky. Definitely on the Internet.

Has your work been featured anywhere? Here and there. The Penguin Publisher site, Dissocia, ASH, LIVE magazine,Deadline, The Guardian.

How has your writing developed and what about it’s future? Yes, it has. I started writing in 2008 after winning a poetry competition at The Roundhouse Theatre. Working as a young editor at Penguin Publisher, I used to write alternative chapters for novels and so had to ventriloquise different author’s styles. So I’ve moved between different styles of writing. I’m still moving. I write experimental theatre pieces which I’m hoping can be adapted for TV and film shorts. There is, however, poetry in everything I write.

How supportive and fertile is Oxford as a space for creative writing? I was the president of the Oxford University Poetry Society 2010-11 so I was able to interact with some of my favorite poets as well as some of Oxford’s student poets. That really enthuses one as a writer. Moreover, in my first year I worked on a TV development course with the Broadcasting Professor. I think the people and the opportunities are here and you’ve just got grab them with your ‘write’ hand.

It is a far too often used phrase to convey the urgency with which I wish to suggest the reader attend this exhibition, but truly, the National Portrait Gallery’s Lucian Freud: Portraits is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Of course, the art itself more than merits this accolade; however, the reason I am so adamant that all who truly love art must visit this exhibition is that it will never conceivably be reassembled. Comprising works from all stages in the artist’s long and multifarious career, approximately half of the pieces have been sourced from private owners. Indeed, the outpouring of affection towards Freud after his death in July 2011, has allowed the NPG to source works from a plethora of private collections. However, having impressed on you an urgency to attend this exhibition, which ends on 27^th May, for social and historical reasons, I will seek to justify myself through artistic ones.

More than any recent exhibition in London, perhaps besides the Tate Modern’s recent retrospective on Miro, the NPG placed its focus on the historical progression of the artist. Whilst it is no doubt typical to group pieces by date rather than theme for such events, in this case, the foregrounding of Freud’s development is key. If a watershed is useful in pinpointing the moment of transformation in the aesthetic of the artist, then we must place Woman Smiling in this position. From his earliest paintings in 1941, though to 1958, the image of the human form presented to us by Freud is both smooth and pale. Indeed, there is no sense of the progressive layering of oil upon oil that is so symptomatic of his later style; instead, we are presented with the flattened features of man devoid of movement or vitality. This is nowhere better exemplified than in his series depicting his first wife, Kathleen Epstein, where her skin is pale to the point of anemia with a wide-eyed expression of both sorrow and loneliness. Indeed, as we move through the exhibition, we realise that the view is continually denied the eye-contact that allows for an emotional connection to be created. Freud’s models are seemingly ashamed of their participation, and we are not observers but voyeurs at their vulnerability.

It is in one of such paintings of Epstein, Girl in a Dark Jacket, that we can first see Freud’s association with Cubism. It is only slight, he does not descend into abstraction of the features as Picasso did, but the face is certainly formed of angular shapes rather than flowing contours and we can see how his eye has broken the features down into shapes, viewing the parts that form the whole. This connection of Cubism is something that I would like to emphasis throughout his work, though it is a maturation of Picasso’s earlier application, I use the term then to describe Freud’s vision rather than his creations. Even as Freud developed his style post-Woman Smiling, there is still a sense that the face is a composite of shapes, not an integral and unified structure. When he talks about mapping the ‘landscapes of the face’ we understand how the British artist would have viewed such a project; the patchwork quilt of British farmland, with its rich earthy colouring, is the very landscape that Freud captures in the features of his models. Indeed, it is hard to believe that words such as Sleeping Nude, painted in 1950, could have been from the same artists who re-imagined the human form in all its ugliness in Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, painted forty-five years later. The smooth textures of the early work have been completely transformed into an earthy, contoured body that revels in its unconventional choice of subject. There is no idealized beauty after 1958, but there is something true that we cannot ignore.

One could dwell for hours with any of these paintings, and the only disappointment with so large a collection is that we cannot; however, if one had to choose only a handful of pieces to exemplify Freud’s later style then perhaps these would feature. One of Freud’s favourite models, and the one that provides the most interesting poses, was Leigh Bowery. Bald and overweight, the depictions of Bowery are a confrontational assault on the viewer sensibilities, with Leigh Bowery (Seated) being amongst the most provocative. A similar effect occurs with ‘Big Sue’, Freud’s ‘Benefit Supervisor’ whose presence forces us to re-examine our own perceptions of the human form. However, where Bowery exudes confidence, dominating the centre of the canvas, the painting Freddy Standing highlights the vulnerability of man. Ushered into the corner of the room, the figure appears thin and gaunt, a victim not an entertainer. It is when Freud captures this fragility in his work that we feel the most moved; both man and woman are stripped back to an essential being and both are found desensualised and alone. Indeed, man’s inability to connect with his fellow man is ever present, in the solo depictions of individuals and even more so when the models fail to interact within group compositions. If Freud speaks to us through these works, then it is to remind us of our inalienable solitude.