Patrick Wright got to know the Thames estuary while studying English and American Literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury in the early 1970’s. Having afterwards spent two terms as a supply teacher at the since demolished Sir William Nottidge School above Whitstable, he fled to Vancouver in 1974 and didn’t come back to England until five years later, when he started exploring the themes and preoccupations of his books, On Living in an Old Country (1985); A Journey through Ruins: the Last Days of London (1991); The Village that Died for England (1985); The River : The Thames in Our Time (1999); and, most recently, The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness (2020).
Having spent many years as a self-employed writer, broadcaster and occasional curator, he started researching and teaching at universities in 2000. He worked simultaneously at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and the London Consortium, an interdisciplinary post-graduate programme connected to Tate, the Architectural Association and Birkbeck in London. In 2011 he joined King’s College London as Professor of Literature and Visual Culture.
The Sea View Has Me Again was written as part of a wider investigation with the collaboration of the translator Damion Searls, the film-maker Shona Illingworth, and Big Fish Arts of Sheerness.
Photo: Patrick Wright
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