Ellen Phethean works as a sound artist and poet, playwright and editor. She runs Diamond Twig Press, which she founded with Julia Darling.
She has performed her poetry and plays on radio and stage with The Poetry Virgins, a women's performance poetry group. Her work appears in Sauce (Bloodaxe Books) and her poems for children have been anthologised and illustrated by Sarah Garland in Shimmy with my Granny, (Macdonald Young Books 1999) and See You Later, Escalator, chosen by John Foster, (OUP 2002).
As resident Audio Artist at the Sage Gateshead, Ellen was involved in providing community based writing / audio activities as part of the Voices of the River's Edge project. Her A Sonic Quilt was one of the installations downstairs at Sage Gateshead, incorporating sounds, natural and imagined, of the activities and groups, wild life and individuals that inhabit the river's edge, from raucous kittiwakes to the quiet of a needle through cloth: open your ears and let the pictures in. It is linked to a textile quilt by Clare Satow and the people of Gateshead.
Her play Olympia, inspired by Angela Carter's bustling magic realist novel Nights at the Circus, was performed by final year Performance Students from the University of Northumbria, during the Christmas 2005 season.
She was writer in residence for Seven Stories, The Centre for The Children's Book, Ouseburn, and Writing On the Wall in 2003, for which she has written a novel in poems, title Wall, telling the story of troubled teenager Kylie. This won joint First Prize in the Bishop Auckland Crossover Novel Competition in October 2004, and has been published by Smokestack Books: a poem from Wall, Down the Dene, was our March 2007 Poem of the Month.
She is working on the next novel in similar form, but isn't getting anywhere with it.
She is also working on poems at the moment, and is sending them out at last. So far Rain Dog, Blinking Eye, Freelance Press and Smith's Knoll have all taken poems, so she's feeling encouraged to keep going.
She teaches Writing for Children to adults at The Centre for Lifelong Learning, at Newcastle University, and is currently doing the MA in Creative Writing part time there as well.
Ellen is a sometime contributor to the Diamond Twig author diaries and is resolved to write more frequently in future.
