Creative Writing graduate awarded the 2021 Leanne Bridgewater Award

The award was set up by the University of Salford for graduates on the MA Creative Writing: Innovation and Experiment course as a tribute to a former MA student, Leanne Bridgewater, who sadly passed away in 2019.

Upon receiving the award, Lucy was grateful and shared: “We looked at Leanne’s work during the course and it was an honour to receive the award because her work is very much intertwined with my own.

“She experimented with a lot of translation practices and was quite a strong animal rights activist, and myself being a vegan, I was very impressed with her poetry that deals with animal rights.

“It’s very bittersweet because I know I would have loved to collaborate with her. The lecturers always spoke very fondly of her, so it’s a great honour to even be compared with her work because she was such a strong experimenter on the course. And reading her work was what drove me to really test out my own work in my dissertation.”

Dr Judy Kendall, Reader in English and Creative Writing, was part of the decision-making to present Lucy with the award and worked closely with her during her year at the university.

She said: “Deciding who should get the 2021 award was very easy. Throughout the year, we have consistently been impressed by Lucy’s work. It is highly innovative and excitingly experimental in tough, rigorous and absorbing ways.

“I am particularly impressed by the ways in which she has drawn on her bilingual and translation experiences in her creative work, and also made use of that creative work to investigate bilingualism in all sorts of fascinating ways.

“In addition, her work also has links with Leanne Bridgewater's own creative outputs, and I am sure Leanne would have been delighted to know Lucy was the recipient this year.”

Lucy’s work this past year mainly focused on the interaction between language, translation and the visual text, as well as the effect technology has on writing.

She said: “I found it interesting that because of the pandemic, we’ve been using technology so much more. So, I thought it would be interesting to look at the translation between how we represent a poem on a page versus how we can represent it differently on the computer.

“I experimented with some graphic design throughout my dissertation and how we could bring a poem that had been written by hand and digitally, because obviously the translation will never be the same as it’s done by a computer. So, for me, it was about what is gained when it’s lost in translation?”

Throughout her master’s, Lucy had been working remotely due to the pandemic, which was a change from her undergraduate degree where she was in person. However, she was still certain that she learnt a lot from her degree.

“I learnt that experimentation will always work even if it fails because it’s the whole process to me that matters the most with my writing,” she said. “It’s also the ability to understand yourself and understand others because a lot of the times when I was doing this work, I was realising parts of myself that I hadn’t really known or acknowledged.”

Following her master’s, Lucy is currently working as a Digital Marketing Assistant in Spain but will be returning to the UK soon with an idea of doing an exhibition of her work at the university.

Lucy can be found posting updates about her work on her Twitter and Instagram.