Jade Cuttle is pursuing her PhD in literature at Clare Hall, focusing on British nature poets of colour under the supervision of Robert Macfarlane. Jade has been selected as one of ten of the UK’s most promising arts and humanities early career researchers through the 2024 cohort of New Generation Thinkers, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the BBC. The New Generation Thinkers were selected from hundreds of applications, and will receive the opportunity to share their research on BBC Radio 4, along with resources and support from AHRC and the BBC.

“I’m delighted to be named a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2024 for my AHRC-funded research into nature poetry, and excited to start muddying BBC airwaves with my ‘worms-eye view’. Applying my passion for metal detecting and mudlarking to the field of literature, I’ll be investigating this genre from the ground up – digging between the ‘dancing daffodils’ to unearth evidence of an overlooked tradition. This includes listening to the poets of colour whose books have represented until 2008 less than 1% of all published poetry in Britain. I’m interested in rethinking poetry as a trade of ideas and coinings as intellectual currency, or ‘scriptocurrency’ as I call it. As a nature writer myself, currently writing a book called Silthood – a term I coined to trace ancient connections between soil and self – I have a personal investment in this subject. I think the NGT scheme is a fantastic opportunity to bring academic research to a wider audience that as a former Arts Commissioning Editor at The Times I really admire. It’s the reason I founded StorySphere, a consulting agency for creative minds, so I’m pleased to see a passion for public engagement have a place in academia today.”

-Jade Cuttle

Jade Cuttle is an award-winning writer who began her career writing for the Guardian, the Observer and foreign news reporting, before working at The Times as an Arts Commissioning Editor. Jade commissioned and wrote a range of arts features, interviews and reviews, winning a ‘30 To Watch: Journalism Award’ for her work. She continues to write as a freelance journalist while completing AHRC-funded research at Cambridge.

Jade’s research provides first scholarship on the work of British nature poets of colour ahead of the publication of Britain’s landmark anthology Nature Matters: New Poetries by Black and Asian Writers of the diaspora. Jade’s theories on the geology of language have been broadcast on Radio 3, along with her album Algal Bloom, with televised appearances across BBC One, ITV and Look North. Her first book of nature writing Silthood is forthcoming. She’s a Ledbury Critic, a program funded by the AHRC EDI Fellowship to diversify poetry criticism, and has taught at the Universities of Sheffield, Arts Bournemouth and Poetry School. She gained a First in MMLL at Homerton, before completing her Masters in Creative Writing to Distinction at UEA. In her spare time, she is a professional historical reenactor, one of Britain’s first female warriors of colour. Follow Jade’s work at www.jadecuttle.co.uk and @JadeCuttle.