Author Profile : Eley Williams is a British author
Name: Eley Williams also known as Dr. Eley Williams is a British author. She is a well known author who has published a number of playful stories since years, for various magazines.
Timeline: 2017 – Attrib. and Other Stories
2019 – Resist: Stories of Uprising in 2019,
2019 – Pursuit: The Balvenie in 2019
2020 – The Liar’s Dictionary to be published this year
Her book ‘The Liar’s Dictionary’ explores the themes of creativity and trust, celebrates the absurdity, fragility and rigidity of language and names the un-nameable. This formidable, young and brilliant writer has indeed introduced this exhilarating debut novel for her readers.
Background : Eley Williams completed her PhD on dictionaries. Eley Williams supervises a journal for contemporary prose poetry, ‘Jungftak’. She also teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her educational background includes a Doctorate in Unclear Definitions: Investigating Dictionaries’ Fictitious Entries through Creative and Critical Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. She completed her Post-Graduation in Critical thesis: ‘Such a lot of rot’: The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold as Commentary to the Creative Drive and ‘Writer’s Block’ Phenomenon. As an Undergraduate at the University of Cambridge she took up Dissertation : Manual Dexterity: Keats as Failed Physician and Ambitious Poet in ‘This Living Hand’.
Eley’s sister is a vet who shares stories of how things go wrong with animals, their inability to communicate etc, all of which Eley links in her stories.
Genre: Eley William’s stories focus mainly on meanings, words, silence, sound, working at gaps between speech and thought, strangers and lovers.
Literary Contributions: Eley Williams is a British writer. Eley Williams has received the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize in 2005. She was awarded for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018 and Republic of Consciousness Prize 2018 for her debut collection of Attrib. and other stories as well as prose.
Unique Stylistic Features: The prose that Eley Williams pens is playful, irreverent and affectionate. She explores the difficulties of communicating exactly our emotions and thoughts. Frequent wordplay is a striking feature of her writing. She has an eye for details and looks searchingly at things that most of us take for granted.
Some of her areas of research include Nineteenth Century Studies, Lexicography, Experimental Fiction, Mountweazels, Onomasiology, Esquivalience and Conceptual Dictionaries. She has particular interest in occurrences of queering and queered language within outré dictionary and lexicographical writing forms.