Elsa Hammond

Elsa Hammond is a Stipendiary Lecturer in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She completed her doctorate on breath and the culture of air in the poetry of Coleridge and Tennyson at the University of Bristol, and has an article on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin and the health of air forthcoming. She is an award-winning travel writer, and a poet whose work focuses particularly on solitude in the natural world (co-author, The Wild Guide to Southern and Eastern England, UK Travel Media Awards Travel Guide of the Year 2015). In 2014 she undertook a solo rowing expedition on the Pacific Ocean, and is now exploring in poetry the experience of being alone at sea for almost two months.

Past engagements include: BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, TEDx Bath, the Stanford Travel Writers Festival, the Hay Literary Festival, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution.