Over the last ten years I’ve published poems on a range of subjects, from romance to domestic space to internet shock images to weird experiments with dolphins. My pamphlets have come out, or are forthcoming, with The Emma Press, Valley Press, and Broken Sleep Books, and I’m working towards a full collection. In 2017, I was one of six winners of the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Awards for a collection of poems by an author under thirty. I'm currently working on a novel set in Nantes, France - a coming-of-age story with elements of urban fantasy - and a memoir about my relationship with my favourite band. I also write for children, for theatre (including musical theatre - I participate as a lyricist in the Book, Music and Lyrics development scheme) and as an academic critic, focused on Shakespeare and early modern literature, and their reception by contemporary creators and audiences. Publications in this field include an article on fictional representations of Ben Jonson, a book chapter on 20th century adaptations of Volpone - including two musicals - and a book chapter on the unpleasant character of Shakespeare in Upstart Crow and Something Rotten. My practice-led PhD research was on Shakespeare and the development of verse drama. 

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• A Bloody Mess, O'Brien, R. 1 Dec 2014
• Dragons of the Prime: Poems About Dinosaurs, O'Brien, R. 2019
• The Bard-baiting Model in Upstart Crow and Something Rotten, O'Brien, R. 1 Apr 2020, Shakespeare and his Biographical Afterlives, New York, Berghahn Books
• "I Know My Clay": Some Musical Afterlives of Hamlet's Gravedigger, O'Brien, R. 15 Feb 2021, In: Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation
• Adapting Jonson: Three Twentieth-Century Volpones, O'Brien, R. Dec 2020, Ben Jonson and Posterity , New York, Cambridge University Press
• Community and Conflict: A Practitioner’s Perspective on Verse Drama, O'Brien, R. 12 Dec 2018, In: Connotations
• ‘We are folk / Who understand unhampered language best’: Peter Oswald, T. S. Eliot, and the Possibilities of (Contemporary) Poetic Drama at Shakespeare’s Globe, O'Brien, R. 7 Sep 2020, In: Coup de Théâtre
• “Every Man According to the Squip”: Magic, Metatheatre and Mind Control from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Be More Chill, O'Brien, R. 1 Mar 2020, Critical Insights , Amenia, Grey House/Salem Press
• Married at First Sight: A TV Literature Experiment, O'Brien, R., Nicholls, J. 4 Dec 2021, Television Series as Literature, Singapore, Palgrave Macmillan
• The Emmores: Love poems, O'Brien, R., Wright, E. 28 Jan 2014

Rebecca Ferrier Suffer, Pilgrim: How can a work of historical fiction explore pilgrimage narratives, with particular focus on the relationship between suffering and virtue? Start Date: 01/10/2023

English Literature PhD December 06 2017