Philippa Holloway is an author and academic, currently teaching Creative Writing at Staffordshire University but with her heart back home in Wales where she grew up. She write novels, short stories and non-fiction. Her debut novel, The Half-life of Snails, (Parthian Books) was longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize for ‘a distinguished work evoking the spirit of place’ and praised on BBC Radio 4s Front Row. It has also been featured in an international podcast and serialized in a national newspaper. Her short fiction/non-fiction is published globally in various publications including New Contrast, Litro, Literati, Lunate, Comma Press, Commonwealth Writers, and as single authored chapbooks with Nightjar Press and Broken Sleeps Books. She has also won prizes in literary awards including the Rhys Davies Short Story Award, the Fish Publishing Prize, and the Writers & Artists Working Class Writer’s Prize.
Her specialisms include prose fiction, creative processes and nuclear psychogeography, and this is seen in her novel and her recent mini-memoir Energy Crisis (Broken Sleep Books) which considered different energy productions on Ynys Mon with her own disability. She has been commissioned for contributions to various interdisciplinary projects including Made From Light at Tate Liverpool, Power in The Land, Material Cultures of Energy and the resultant Energy Communication Toolkit (2021), and the Cognitive Sensations Project. She is Writer in Residence at Hack Green Nuclear Bunker and member of Liverpool University’s Literature and Science Research Hub, and is co-editor of a textbook on writing Landscape and the Anthropocene. She is the co-curator of 100 Words of Solitude, a global writing project responding to the pandemic, and co-editor of the collection 100 Words of Solitude: Global Voices in Lockdown 2020 (Rare Swan Press).
