jay.waters@warwick.ac.uk

Biography and Research

Waters is a PhD student in Literary Practice supervised by Tim Leach and Ross Forman at the University of Warwick. They hold an MA in Creative Writing, and a BA in English and American Literature and Creative Writing. Their work is primarily in short-form horror fiction, with particular interest in the combination of the surreal, the abject, and the mundane. As a result, they write a lot about nasty things growing inside walls.

Their PhD project, Greyless, is a novel that takes the sidelong step from horror into fantasy, following the journey taken by a girl as she leaves her village in an attempt to return a ghostly child to its unknown place of origin. The streets of her village hunt her down, unwilling to be left behind. The project draws from the work of such authors as Alan Garner, Dianna Wynne Jones, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Phillip Pullman, both from an aesthetic standpoint and as an investigation into where the line between 'fiction for children' and 'fiction for adults' becomes troubled