creative writing at university of east anglia

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Creative Writing: Prose Fiction

Entry requirements.

Degree Subject - Any Subject

Degree Classification - Bachelors (Hons) degree (2.1 or equivalent preferred)

For more information see our website .

Months of entry

Course content.

The MA Prose Fiction at UEA is the oldest and most prestigious Creative Writing programme in the UK. Solely focused on the writing of fiction, we take a rigorous and creative approach to enable you to develop your ideas, voice, technique and craft.

You’ll experience an intensive immersion in the study of writing prose fiction. You will take core creative modules but can also choose from a wide range of critical modules, and benefit from our proven strengths in modernism and creative-critical studies, among others.

Graduates of our MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction have enjoyed extraordinary success in terms of publications and prizes. Our alumni include Nobel Laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Baileys Women’s Prize-winner Naomi Alderman, Emma Healey and Tash Aw. The continuing success of our graduates means we are fortunate in being able to attract the best writers from around the world – writers like you.

While you are at UEA, the focus will very much be on exploring your creative potential, in a highly supportive and well-resourced environment.

In 2011, UEA’s Creative Writing programme was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in recognition of our continuing excellence in delivering innovative courses at a world-class level.

Information for international students

For more information for international students, please go to UEA’s website .

Fees and funding

Find out more about UEA’s funding options .

Qualification, course duration and attendance options

• Campus-based learning is available for this qualification

Course contact details

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University of east anglia uea: creative writing scriptwriting, full-time, 1 years starts sep 2023.

**Overview**

Prepare for a career writing for theatre, film, or television with an MA that allows you to explore and produce dramatic writing across the media.

You’ll study both the theory and practice of dramatic writing, addressing contemporary critical debates, analysing written and performance texts, and experimenting with a range of techniques in original writing. You’ll develop your skills in constructive criticism and creative editing of your peers’ writing, creating a supportive writers’ network in the process.

You’ll be taught by renowned theorists, practitioners, and visiting specialists through seminars, presentations, screenings, workshops, readings, and performance visits. All with the rigour and professional insight that are the hallmark of our creative writing teaching.

**About This Course**

The scriptwriting strand of our world-renowned MA Creative Writing has three core modules.

First, Dramaturgy, in which you’ll study the core conventions of drama as explored from Aristotle to McKee and as embodied in a range of plays, films, and TV programmes, from Antigone to I May Destroy You.

You will also take part in the Scriptwriting workshop, building upon your study of dramaturgical theory, where each week you will benefit from the scrutiny and feedback of your fellow writers and workshop leaders, such as the renowned scriptwriters Steve Waters, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Molly Naylor, Ben Musgrave, and Sian Evans. You’ll incorporate this theory into your own writing practice in weekly creative development workshops, completing scriptwriting and planning exercises. Over the course of the workshop, you and your fellow writers will bring your exercises to the group for discussion and evaluation.

You’ll then go on to study the Process module, where you will explore the differing contexts of scriptwriting across media and develop a script for your choice of medium, building an idea from concept to realisation and exploring the modes of script development that are common practice for working writers.

Over the summer, you’ll also write a dissertation, under the supervision of a member of our faculty.

**Disclaimer**

Course details are subject to change. You should always confirm the details on the provider's website: **www.uea.ac.uk**

Part-Time, 2 years starts Sep 2023

Full-time, 1 years started sep 2022.

Prepare for a career writing for theatre, film or television with an MA that allows you to explore and produce dramatic writing across the media.

You’ll be taught by renowned theorists, practitioners and visiting specialists through seminars, presentations, screenings, workshops, readings and performance visits. All with the rigour and professional insight that are the hallmark of our creative writing teaching.

First, Dramaturgy, in which you will study the core principles of drama as explored from Aristotle to McKee and as embodied in a range of plays, films and TV programmes, from Antigone to Game of Thrones.

You will also take part in the Scriptwriting workshop, building upon your study of dramaturgical theory, where each week you will benefit from the scrutiny and feedback of your fellow writers and workshop leaders. You will incorporate this theory into your own writing practice in weekly creative development workshops, completing scriptwriting and planning exercises. Over the course of the workshop, you and your fellow writers will bring your exercises to the group for discussion and evaluation.

Alongside these modules runs the Process module, where you will develop a script for your choice of medium, building an idea from concept to realisation under the keen eye of an industry expert and exploring the modes of script development that are common practice for working writers.

Over the summer you will also write a dissertation, under the supervision of a member of our faculty.

Part-Time, 2 years started Sep 2022

University of East Anglia

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Is the UEA creative writing course still the best?

A mid all the hoo-ha over one of the writers shortlisted for this year's Costa book awards being a nurse lies a more interesting nugget. Christie Watson , is a graduate of the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. Watson, whose book Tiny Sunbirds Far Away is nominated in the first-novel category, chose her course wisely. The MA was founded in 1971 by Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury for writers "of originality and potential". Among its alumni are Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright and Trezza Azzopardi.

So how come the UEA course packs such a punch? Novelist Giles Foden, who teaches on the course, thinks: "It works because we admit very good students; because of the long culture of helping writers to find the right form for their ideas; and because of the emphasis placed on reading other writers' work."

Don't other courses do that? Yes, says Juliet Brooke, an editor at Chatto & Windus, who agrees that UEA has a high status in publishing – but says similar courses at Bath and London's City University do too. "Ultimately, it doesn't really matter whether the writer has done a course or not – if a book's brilliant, it will stand alone."

Recent UEA graduates

Susan Fletcher : graduated in (2002): won Whitbread First Novel Award 2005

Naomi Alderman : graduated in (2003): Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2007

Diana Evans : graduated in (2003): won Orange Award for New Writers 2005 with her novel with 26a.

Emma Crowe : graduated in (2005): plays include Charged and Kin

• University of East Anglia
• Costa book awards
• Awards and prizes
• Higher education
• Creative writing

Most viewed

Jean McNeil

Professor, Professor of Creative Writing

• Professor of Creative Writing , School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
• Member , Creative Writing Research Group
• Steering Committee Member , CreativeUEA
• Steering Committee Member , ClimateUEA

1.19b Arts and Humanities Building

Accepting PhD Students

Personal profile

Areas of expertise.

Creative Writing, Contemporary African Literature, Environmental Writing, Creative Non-fiction, Contemporary Canadian Fiction, Polar literature and history; Scott Antarctic Centenary; Antarctic literature and history; history of exploration and science, esp. the polar regions; Latin American literature and politics; South African and Namibian literature and history; contemporary North American fiction; the contemporary short story.

Video: Walter Benjamin (More then a Sign) A film by Diego Ferrari, Jean McNeil and Bernard Arce 2017

JEAN McNEIL is Professor of Creative Writing and the author of fourteen books, including seven novels and a collection of short fiction. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards and has won the Prism International Competitions for short fiction and for creative non-fiction. Her work has been nominated for the Governor General's award for fiction, the Journey Prize, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation National literary awards and the Pushcart Prize (Canada/USA). She was the winner of the 2016 Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival's Grand Prize for her memoir Ice Diaries , based on the year she spent as writer in residence in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey. As well as working in Antarctica, she has undertaken official scientific and environmental writing residencies in the Falkland Islands, in Svalbard, and aboard ship-based expeditions to Greenland and across the Atlantic ocean. Multidisciplinary work includes an art exhibition in 2018 on landscape and the life and work of Walter Benjamin, as well as curating and writing the texts for ‘Notes on the Anthropocene’ as part of Barcelona Gallery Weekend in 2020. A short film collaboration with filmmaker and photographer Philip Lee Harvey based on one of her poems, 'Trying to Stay Light' won the short film category at the European Film Awards and a Prisma award in 2020-21. Her novel Day for Night was published in 2021 and won the Gold Medal in Literary Fiction at the Independent Publishers (IPPY) awards in the US. At UEA she is Director of Creative Writing and also International co-ordinator for the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, heading up the International Chair for Creative Writing Africa Year. On the MA, she teaches the optional module The Non Fiction Novel and Prose Fiction Workshop. In 2023 she will be the Inauguaral University of Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSHARC) Fellow in Creative Practice and will be based there and at Australia National University in Canberra. For more information see www.jeanmcneil.co.uk

  [email protected]

Publications

Day for Night , ECW Press, May 2021.

Fire on the Mountain, February 2018, Legend Press, UK.

The Dhow House, Legend Press, UK 2016 and ECW Press, Canada/US, 2017.

The Ice Lovers,  2009, McArthur & Company, Toronto, Canada.

The Interpreter of Silences,  2006, McArthur & Company, Toronto, Canada.

Private View,  2003, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, UK.

Nights in a Foreign Country (collection of stories), 2001, Orion/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, UK.

Hunting Down Home (novel). Milkweed Editions (USA), 1999; Phoenix House, (Orion/Weidenfeld & Nicolson), London 1996; Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, Canada, 1996

Non-fiction

'The Fate of Space,' principal essay for the catalogue of Space at the Centre: London 1994-2007 , solo exhibition by Diego Ferrari, Pigment Gallery, Barcelona, opening September 2021.

'Notes on the Anthropocene,' catalogue essay for the exhibition of the same name, Pigment Gallery/Pasaje Montoya, Barcelona Gallery Weekend, September 2020.

Editor and contributor, 'Exile from the Stage' (essay) in Day for Night: Landscapes of Walter Benjamin by Diego Ferrari and Jean McNeil (anthology/exhibition catalogue). Benjamin Editions, London, 2018.

Ice Diaries (memoir/travel), ECW Press, Canada/US, April 2016; UK, 2018.

The Ice Diaries: Antarctic work-in-progress . Limited edition, Arts Council of England, 2006

From the Library of Graham Greene . Rampant Lions Press, Cambridge, UK, Selection of Graham Greene’s annotated books and a long essay on his personal library, 1993

Night Orders: Poems from Antarctica and the Arctic , Smith/Doorstop poetry publishers/Environment Institute Press, University College London, 2011

The Rough Guide to Costa Rica (sole author). Rough Guides, London, 1994-2012

The Rough Guide to Central America (contributor: Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Rough Guides, London, 1997-2007

‘Infinite’ – Co-director and scriptwriter, New Views at the National Theatre,Royal National Theatre, London. 2010-11

Articles, essays and short stories published in literary journals (selection)

'Arboreal', in Women on Nature , ed. Katharine Norbury, Unbound, May 2021.

'Horse People', story in One Life , magazine of Jaguar/Land Rover, October 2019.

'The Kusi,' in The Mechanics Institute Review issue 16: Climate , September 2019.

' Temps Mort' in Winter Garden . London: Flat Time House, 2015.

'The Skeleton Coast,' Prism International , 2013. (Finalist, 2013 Prism International Creative non-fiction competition).

‘Ice Diaries: a climate change memoir,’ Prism International , Vancouver, Canada, spring 2012. (Winner, Prism International 2012 Creative non-fiction competition).

‘The Ice Lovers’ (extract), five poems from Night Orders , in Landscapes of Exploration , Peninsula Arts/University of Plymouth (art exhibition catalogue), 2012.

‘The Road to Digby Neck,’ Writers’ Hub,  www.writershub.net , September 2011.

Academic articles, reviews and journalism (selection)

‘Disclosure: the ethics of making the private public in prose fiction workshops - some reflections from the University of East Anglia’ in Writing as Dialogue , Haute école specialisée bernoise, (Bern University of Applied Sciences) Biel, Switzerland, and Columbia University Press, New York, USA. November 2018.

‘The rhetoric of prose fiction workshop – an analysis of teaching methods at the University of East Anglia’ in Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa , peer reviewedOfficial journal of SAACLALS (Southern African Association for Commonwealth Literature & Languages), October 2015.

‘The Short Story’ in Body of Work , Giles Foden (ed); Full Circle Press, 2011.

‘Among the elephants’, feature article about desert elephants and conservation in Namibia, ( www.writershub.co.uk ), June 2010.

‘The Speed of Ice’; feature, photographs and poetry; lead feature on paleo-climate research in Greenland for the launch of a new online literary magazine, the Writers’ Hub ( www.writershub.co.uk ), January 2010.

‘On the Short Story’, Foreword for the Mechanics Institute Review , Birkbeck College, London, Autumn 2009.

‘Outlander’, review, The Independent , April 2009.

‘To the Ends of the Earth’, review of Antarctic and Arctic anthologies edited by Francis Spufford and Elizabeth Kolbert, The Independent , January 2008.

‘Slicing the Silence: A Journey to Antarctica’, review of book by Tom Griffiths, The Globe and Mail (Canada), October 2007.

Poetry published in literary journals and anthologies (selection)

'The Land of Letting Go,' in Antarcticness , ed. Ilan Kelman, forthcoming from UCL University Press, February 2022.

'The Skeleton Coast,' chapbook collection, shortlisted for the Poetry Business International Chapbook Competition, 2018.

‘Bush of Ghosts’,  The Antigonish Review , Canada, Autumn 2012.

‘Night Orders’ in The North , Sheffield, 2011.

‘Endurance’ Prism International , Vancouver, Canada, 2011.

‘Namibia’ and ‘My Life as a Man’ The Antigonish Review, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2011.

‘Arctic Pilot’, ‘Illulissat’, as part of a feature on Greenland, The Writers’ Hub, www.writershub.net , London, 2009.

“You Fall in Love with Orpheus” and “Famine Suite”, The Antigonish Review no 144, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, 2006.

Fine Art collaborations

Co-exhibitor: 'Day for Night: Landscapes of Walter Benjamin'. Fine art exhibition, Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck College, London. 20 September-27 October.

Speaker/performer: Urban Dialogues Symposium on street photography, Tate Britain, 2015.

Script consultant, ‘As the Academy Turns’, fine-art film by Tiong Ang, Manifesta 8 Art Festival, Murcia and Cartagena, Spain, October 2010.

“The City of the Present Continuous” catalogue/exhibition text for a fine art exhibition by Diego Ferrari, Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography, Israel, 2010.

“The Human Face which we will to be Beautiful”, exhibition text for a fine art film by Diego Ferrari, London 2009, OKK gallery, Berlin, November 2010.

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

Education/Academic qualification

Doctor of Literature, Anglia Ruskin University

Award Date: 4 Jun 2019

Master in Science, University College London

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toronto

External positions

External Examiner, Imperial College London

Fellow, RSA, Regional Studies Association

Fellow, Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

Media Expertise

• Creative Writing
• Climate Change

Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

Dive into details.

Select a country/territory to view shared publications and projects

Projects per year

A partnership for community-led health behaviour change research in areas of high socio-economic disadvantage

Hardeman, W. , Gordon, J. , Hanson, S. , Minihane, A. , Sweeting, A. , Abranches, M. , McNeil, J. , McWatt, T. , Robinson-Pant, A. & Varley, A.

National Institute for Health and Care Research

1/06/23 → 30/11/24

Project : Research

Seed funding a climate change stories repository – the Critical Decade

Tebboth, M. , Le Quéré, C. & McNeil, J.

1/11/22 → 31/10/23

Project : Internal Funding › NERC Discipline Hopping

The Critical Decade for Climate Change

Le Quéré, C. , McNeil, J. & Tebboth, M.

Leverhulme Trust

1/10/21 → 30/09/27

Project : Training

Just Scapes

Martin, A. & McNeil, J.

Economic and Social Research Council

1/12/20 → 31/05/24

Voices across the Reeds: Dramatising the effects of climate and time on RSPB Strumpshaw Fen, Norfolk

Gordon, J. , McNeil, J. & Waters, S.

Arts and Humanities Research Council

24/09/21 → 23/01/22

Project : Other

Research output

• 1 Other chapter contribution

Research output per year

Day for Night: A Novel

Research output : Book/Report › Book

Tackling Child Malnutrition in Developing Countries

Research output : Non-textual form › Film

Fire on the Mountain

The dhow house, ice diaries: a memoir, press/media, gilded cage: a wealthy white family in east africa faces an islamist uprising.

1 item of Media coverage

Press/Media : Press / Media

Ice Diaries artfully conveys an outsider's account of Antarctica

Jean mcneil's stunning memoir of home, family and antarctica.

University of East Anglia: Arts bears brunt of faculty staff cuts

• Published 20 June

A lecturers' union has confirmed 31 compulsory staff cuts will be made within one university department.

The University of East Anglia (UEA) is facing a multimillion-pound deficit and wants to reduce staff by 113, in addition to those leaving voluntarily.

The University and College Union said 31 of 36 cuts at the university's faculties would fall on Arts and Humanities.

The UEA said all subject areas at the department would be "maintained".

They include the university's hugely successful creative writing course .

The president of the UEA branch of the union, Mark Walmsley, said management should be considering other options, including spreading savings required over two academic years.

"There is a way out of this financial crisis that has been created at UEA that doesn't require compulsory redundancies," said Mr Walmsley.

"We'll be working with the university and, if we have to, taking industrial action, to ensure that we achieve that 'no compulsory redundancy' position."

In its statement, the UEA said: "The university has been very clear that compulsory redundancies remain a last resort.

"To secure UEA's future financial stability, the university needs to make £30m savings by September.

"The student experience remains a key priority for UEA and all students will be supported to complete their studies."

A total of 77 jobs in professional services and faculty professional services form part of the 113 job losses.

University boss looks to job cuts to slash deficit

Staff agreeing to quit jobs saves university £6m

How did a university end up facing a £30m deficit?

Student applications to UEA were down 16% this year compared to 2022, with 2,792 fewer students seeking places at the Norwich-based institution.

In 2021-22, the UEA made a £74m loss.

The students' union council passed a no-confidence vote in the UEA executive team in May.

Follow East of England news on Facebook , Instagram and Twitter . Got a story? Email [email protected] or WhatsApp us on 0800 169 1830

Related Topics

University of East Anglia

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• Published 6 June

• Published 22 May

Loss-making university boss says it did not adapt

• Published 4 May

• Published 28 April
• Published 13 March

Related Internet Links

University and College Union

Fall Preview

Putting Women at the Center of Human Evolution

Cat Bohannon’s book, “Eve,” looks at the way women’s bodies evolved, and how a focus on male subjects in science has left women “under-studied and under-cared for.”

Cat Bohannon “realized we needed a kind of user’s manual for the female mammal,” as she writes in her new book. Credit... Chona Kasinger for The New York Times

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By Sarah Lyall

• Sept. 11, 2023

The author Cat Bohannon was a preteen in Atlanta in the 1980s when she saw the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” for the first time. As she took in its famous opening scene, in which a bunch of apes picks up a bunch of bones and quickly begins using them to hit each other, Bohannon was struck by the sheer maleness of the moment.

“I thought, ‘Where are the females in this story?’” Bohannon said recently, imagining what those absent females might have been up to at that particular time. “It’s like, ‘Oh, sorry, I see you’re doing something really important with a rock. I’m just going to go over there behind that hill and quietly build the future of the species in my womb.”

That realization was just one of what Bohannon, 44, calls “a constellation of moments” that led her to write her new book, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.”

A page-turning whistle-stop tour of mammalian development that begins in the Jurassic Era, “Eve” recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology by placing women at its center.

The idea is that by examining how women evolved differently from men, Bohannon argues, we can “provide the latest answers to women’s most basic questions about their bodies.” These include, she says: Why do women menstruate? Why do they live longer? And what is the point of menopause?

These are timely questions. Thanks to regulations established in the 1970s, clinical trials in the United States have typically used mostly male subjects, from mice to humans. (This is known as “the male norm.”) Though that changed somewhat in 1994, when the National Institutes of Health updated its rules, even the new protocols are replete with loopholes. For example: “From 1996 to 2006, more than 79 percent of animal studies published in the scientific journal Pain included only male subjects,” she writes.

That gave rise to the misconception that “being female is just a minor tweak on a Platonic form,” Bohannon notes in the book, and has had profound, and damaging, implications for how medicine is practiced. As she points out in “Eve,” antidepressants and pain medications are considered gender-neutral, despite evidence that they affect women differently than they do men. And it was only in 1999 that researchers began testing sex differences in the use of general anesthesia — discovering, as it happened, that “women wake up faster than men, regardless of their age, weight, or the dosage they’ve been given.”

“Women’s bodies have been under-studied and under-cared for,” Bohannon said, speaking via Zoom from her house in Seattle. “When we put the female body back in the frame, even people who don’t have female bodies have a better of idea of where we all stand in this huge evolutionary story.”

Understanding “the biology of sex differences is going to help all bodies,” she added, including those of cisgender men and of trans men and women. “In the evolutionary sphere, diversity is a feature, not a bug.”

Another impetus for the book came in 2012 when Bohannon, then a graduate student at Columbia, watched a different movie: Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” a prequel to “Alien.” In one scene, an archaeologist, played by Noomi Rapace, asks her spaceship’s “surgery pod” to help her remove the hideous alien squid with which she’s been involuntarily impregnated.

“Error,” the machine says. “This medpod is calculated for male patients only.” As risible as that was to contemplate — who sends highly-trained scientists into space along with medical equipment that works on only some of them? — it was all too familiar to Bohannon.

“When I got home from the movie theater, I realized we needed a kind of user’s manual for the female mammal,” Bohannon writes in “Eve.” “Something that would tear down the male norm and put better science in place.”

Bohannon’s book might be brimming with science, but it’s written with a lay audience in mind. “While it is true that not everybody works around the sciences, everybody lives in a body,” she said. “How your lived experience of being freakin’ born and living your life is absolutely authentic and true and authoritative, and you know better than anyone in the world what it’s been like to live in your body.”

The book is engaging, playful, erudite, discursive and rich with detail. It traces the history of women’s defining features to their origins — a series of Eves, as Bohannon puts it — going back 205 million years. Her first Eve, a small furry creature that looked a bit like a weasel and a bit like a mouse, belonged to the genus Morganucodon. Affectionately referred to as “Morgie” by Bohannon, who paints a vivid picture of her life among the Jurassic beasts 200 million years ago, she was the first mammal to nurse her young.

“Eve” is also replete with interesting, far-afield facts, many tucked inside footnotes. We learn, for instance, that the British-Indian scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who coined the word “clone,” once composed a scientific paper from the confines of a trench in France, where he was stationed during World War I. (One of his co-authors was killed.)

We learn that the apes on “2001” were played by French mimes. And we learn that one of Bohannon’s ex-boyfriends, she writes, “lived alone with 12 guitars, a water bed and an old poster of Tori Amos.”

“Eve” is hard to summarize because it encompasses many fields — evolutionary biology, physiology, paleoanthropology and genetics, to name a few — and it is equally hard to pin down its author. The book may have taken Bohannon a decade to write, but it was a decade in which she also earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University on the evolution of narrative and cognition; got married; moved to Seattle; and had two children, a process she wryly describes as “a reproductive journey.”

She was born in Atlanta. Her parents — a psychology professor and a pianist — divorced when she was young, and her early life was restless and peripatetic, with her interests careering between the sciences and the arts.

While a student at Butler University in Indianapolis, Bohannon temporarily dropped out to join the Revolutionary Anarchist Youth Group in western Massachusetts, and eventually studied poetry with the British poet Andrew Motion at the University of East Anglia.

After a temporary move to Marseille, France and an equally temporary engagement to a French Moroccan biologist, Bohannon relocated to New York and joined several bands, playing the keyboard and guitar. She later enrolled in an M.F.A. program at the University of Arizona and married and divorced a musician. (After the marriage broke up, she said, she lived for three months in her car in a parking lot near the University of Arizona football stadium.) She wrote a lot of poetry, “mostly about science or using scientific literature,” she recalled.

She then went to Columbia, earning an M.F.A. in creative writing before embarking on her Ph.D. Her thesis involved writing computer programs that “analyzed parts of speech in many thousands of novels over the last 400 years in the English language, and treated them as my subject pool to ask cognitive questions,” she explained.

At one point, Bohannon also worked as the unofficial poet-in-residence at Plastination City in Dalian, China, where bodies were being preserved and displayed as art by plastination’s inventor, the German anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens. “Shipwreck,” an essay she wrote on von Hagens’s work, was published in The Georgia Review in 2005. It piqued the interest of the literary agent Elyse Cheney, who took her on as a client.

Advait Jukar, a paleontologist at the University of Arizona who worked with Bohannon on the paleontological component of “Eve,” called it a “remarkable and important book — one of the first times we’re telling the evolutionary story of women to the general public through this lens.”

“Cat has dabbled in a lot of things throughout her life and she’s written a lot of fascinating articles,” he added. “But her ability to talk to people like me, and to talk to molecular biologists and physiologists and geneticists and piece all that together in a way that is both entertaining and accessible, is a rare gift.

“She’s got a beautiful mind,” he said.

Sarah Lyall is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro desks. More about Sarah Lyall

What to Watch and Listen to This Fall

Highlights from this coming season of the arts..

TV  & Movies

TV Shows: Fall TV this year rolls in amid the fog of the writers’ and actors’ strikes. The network schedules suggest the work stoppages have had an impact .

Oscar Season: What will the movie landscape look like if the strikes continue into late fall or winter? Expect these four things to come to pass .

Jamila Woods: “Water Made Us,” the musician’s new album, achieves the greatest synthesis yet between her voices as a poet and as a songwriter .

Ambrose Akinmusire : The trumpeter has been making some of the most spellbinding music of his career  while preparing for a new role as artistic director of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz.

Ailyn Pérez: Long a rising star, the soprano is getting a new Metropolitan Opera production built around her ; the house’s first Spanish-language show in nearly a century.

Post-Mortem Collaborations: On Broadway, Off Broadway, in special events and out of town, living authors are collaborating with dead ones .

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