Chris McCully was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1958. Educated at Malsis and Bootham, he took a first-class degree in English Language (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1982) and completed a doctorate at the University of Manchester (1988). For many years Chris continued to work in what was then the Department of English at Manchester, specialising in teaching and research on language-related topics, particularly poetic form, poetic history, English phonology, morphology, and metrical structure.
During the 1980's and 90's Chris authored, edited or co-authored collections of poems; essays; a fragment of angling autobiography (which ended up as fiction); a textbook on metrical theory; a dictionary of fly-fishing; conference proceedings....and continued producing academic papers, essays, reviews, and angling features. Some of this work appeared in two journals with which Chris has long been associated, PNReview and Trout and Salmon. Chris also engaged in at least one lecture tour across the USA, and gave poetry readings, papers and talks in the USA, Spain, Poland, Finland, Japan, Canada, France, Germany....and, once, somewhere near Middlesborough.
In 2003 Chris gave up full-time academic work in order to develop a career as a writer. He's still not quite sure whether that was wise, but continues to produce the same range of work - indeed, a wider range, from the analysis of addiction to Ezra Pound's lineation in the Cantos; from the design of pike streamers to the phenomenon of garden gnomes; from level-ordered morphology to the names and structures of seaweeds. In 2004 Jessica Kingsley (London) published his memoir on alcoholism and recovery, Goodbye, Mr. Wonderful, and in 2005 Pearson Longman (London) brought out his co-authored textbook on The Earliest English - a work which was the subject of a positive (and very funny) review in the THES ('How Damgudthyng Conquered the World'). In 2006 - and much to Chris's surprise - CUP reissued in paperback his co-edited work English Historical Metrics. In 2006 he also edited Passion for Pike, by the Dutch writer, artist and photographer Ad Swier (Westerlaan). In 2008 a selection of Chris's translations from Old English appeared from Carcanet Press under its imprint, Fyfield Books, and a further angling title, Sketches with Fishing Rods, with wonderful pencil illustrations by Ad, appeared from Westerlaan. In 2009 a new full-length collection of poems (Polder) was published by Carcanet and a textbook, The Sound Structure of English (with an accompanying website) appeared from CUP. The Medlar Press published Chris's analysis of pike fishing, Fishing and Pike Lures, late in 2009.
Chris has just completed his part of the work involved in the co-edited volume Analysing Older English (forthcoming from CUP), is currently working on a book of essays relating to natural history and the northern Netherlands (provisional title, Outside, forthcoming 2011) and with Ken Whelan and James Sadler has embarked on a major new project concerning Irish sea-trout and sea-trout fishing (Irish Sea-trout: Nomads of the Tides, projected publication 2013, The Medlar Press). A book containing essays on travel, From the Last Sane Places on Earth, is scheduled to appear from Carcanet in 2013, and Chris's Selected Poems will be published, again by Carcanet, in 2011.
Meanwhile, Chris continues to contribute gratefully and with regularity - a happy or frightening regularity, depending on your point of view - to fishing journals both in the UK (Trout and Salmon; Waterlog) and in the Netherlands (De Roofvis - see for example 'Juweeltje van East Yorkshire' ['Jewel of East Yorkshire', the Driffield Beck at Mulberry Whin] in issue number 74, 2009). Some of his essays in Outside have been translated (2009) by Marrie Kuipers, and will appear together with an introductory interview in the Dutch journal Noorderbreedte in 2010.
In 2003 Chris was granted the title of Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Arts, University of Manchester, and (with Michael Schmidt and Rachel Beckett) he remains one of the directors of the Modern Literary Archives Project. In 2010 he was appointed as Managing Director of the new Graduate School in Humanities at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. He also gives a range of training courses on different aspects of writing in the English language to graduates and other professionals (please see also 'Taalcentrum VU' on the Links page).
Chris is married and lives in the north of the Netherlands, close to the Waddenzee. In his non-existent spare time Chris works with the Labrador, Tess, is developing his garden, tries not to fret...and goes fishing.
Photos (above and below): ©James Sadler 2009
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Chris’s books: an overview
FISHING and related:
2013 (under contract/forthcoming) Irish sea-trout: Nomads of the tides. Ludlow: The Medlar Press.
2011 (forthcoming) Outside: Fishing, writing and living by the Wadden Sea. Ullapool: The Two Ravens Press.
2009 Fishing and pike lures. Ludlow: The Medlar Press. 278pp. ISBN 978 1 899600 67 0. hb
2008 Sketches with fishing rods. Lichtenvoorde: Westerlaan. (Ills. by Ad Swier.) 112pp. ISBN 978 90 808453 6 7. hb.
2006 (editor) Ad Swier. Passion for pike. Lichtenvoorde: Westerlaan. 240pp. hb.
1998 The other side of the stream. Shrewsbury: Swan Hill Press. 137pp. ISBN 1 84037 011 4. hb. [rpr US, Stackpole Books, 2004]
1992 Fly-fishing: A book of words. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 280pp. ISBN 0 85635 931 9. hb. [rpr Oxford University Press, 1994, pb.]
POETRY:
2011 (forthcoming) Selected poems. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
2009 Polder. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 98pp. ISBN 978 1 84777 017 2, pb
2008 Old English poems and riddles. Manchester: Carcanet Press/Fyfield Books. 92pp. ISBN 978 1 85754 925 6. pb.
2003 The country of Perhaps. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 94pp. ISBN1 85754 550 8. pb.
1996 Not only I. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 69pp. ISBN 1 85754 255. pb.
1993 Time signatures. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 53pp. ISBN 1 85754 042 5. pb
MEMOIR:
2004 Goodbye, Mr. Wonderful. London: Jessica Kingsley. ISBN 184310265. pb.
ACADEMIC:
*2010 (ed., with David Denison, Ricardo Bermúdez Otero, Emma Moore). Analysing older English. Forthcoming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*2009 The sound structure of English: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Accompanying website on http://www.let.rug.nl/soundstructure/). 233pp. ISBN 978 0 521 85036 0. pb.
*2005 (with Sharon Hilles). The earliest English. London: Pearson Education. 307pp. ISBN 0 582 40474 6. pb.
*2000 (ed., with Ricardo Bermudez Otéro, David Denison and Richard Hogg). Generative theory and corpus studies: A dialogue from 10ICEHL. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 559pp. ISBN 3 11 016687 9. hb.
*1996 (ed., with J.J. Anderson). English historical metrics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 257pp. ISBN 0 521 55464 0. hb. (pb. rpr. CUP, 2006).
1994 (ed.). The poet’s voice and craft. Manchester: Carcanet Press. [Rpr. 1997.] 200pp. ISBN 1 85754 020 4. pb.
*1987 (with Richard Hogg). Metrical phonology: A coursebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rpr. 1990. 279pp. ISBN 0 521 30363 X. hb.
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