Author Interview: Elizabeth Lewis Williams
Q&A with the contributors from our latest issue.
Elizabeth Lewis Williams is a Norwich-based poet and teacher, a lover of islands and the sea. After many years spent teaching in schools, she completed an MA, followed by a PhD, in Creative Writing at the UEA. Her first book, Deception Island, was made into an immersive installation in a replica Antarctic hut, and her second, Erebus, was published in October 2022. She is currently working on a book of creative non-fiction on Antarctica, as well as several other Antarctic poetry projects. Her piece, ‘Arriving’ appears in Hinterland Issue 16.
What’s the last thing (except for this!) that you wrote?
A text to my husband arranging dinner and a night out.
What’s a recent discovery that you can’t keep quiet about?
This is difficult. The last novel I read, Columba’s Bones by David Greig, was unexpectedly wonderful. It’s set on Iona in AD 825, and begins with a bloody massacre by some unreconstructed but oddly funny Vikings. It’s tonally simple, poetic and occasionally brutal, but a beautiful and down-to-earth reflection on love, reconciliation and redemption.
The last film I saw was A Complete Unknown about Bob Dylan’s early career — brilliantly acted with a great soundtrack.
And a book I keep referring to is Tim Ingold’s Lines — an anthropological archaeology of the line which draws out connections between walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing.
Words to live by?
Think positive!
Tell us something about yourself that surprises people...
I once rowed across Scotland in a coastal rowing pair, with my Mum and a friend in a camper van as our safety vehicle. No encounter with Nessie, but it did get very choppy…
What’s your piece in this issue about?
My father worked in the Antarctic between 1959 and 1964, first for the British and then the New Zealand Antarctic programme. Antarctic stories have always been part of my life. I never intended to go, initially because Antarctica was my father’s place, a man’s world, and I wanted to look for adventures elsewhere. He died early and left an unpublished book about his time on the continent, and I became increasingly fascinated not just by his experience, and all the stories of heroic expeditions, but by what this continent has to tell us about our place in the world. I still didn’t think I would go because I couldn’t justify the carbon footprint of the journey there. I decided I would read and write my way there instead. But when I was offered the chance to work as a guest lecturer and run writing workshops on a large Antarctic cruise ship, it was too good an opportunity to turn down. After so many journeys in my mind, the experience of arriving in Antarctic waters not just once but three times was profound, and strangely unexpected.
Issue 16 is available to order over at our webstore now, or in good bookshops.
What a wonderful opportunity that cruise was!