Welcome to Department of English

Hull's Department of English has reason to be proud of its reputation. In the last Research Assessment Exercise of 2008 ninety per cent of our research in the English submission was awarded an international profile, and 55% of our submission was ranked in the top two categories of 'internationally excellent' and 'world class'.

As generations of students have found, Hull, and the East Riding, have a topographical and cultural flavour all of their own. The eminent Australian poet, Peter Porter, called Hull 'the most poetic city in England'.

One of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, Philip Larkin, was Librarian at Hull University. The Poet Laureate Andrew Motion was a lecturer here, and our alumni include poets Roger McGough, Douglas Dunn and Sean O'Brien. John Godber's plays are regularly performed at the City's renowned Hull Truck Theatre, and Alan Ayckbourn centres his activities at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where the University has its second campus. Further back in history, the political satirist and most polished of seventeenth-century poets, Andrew Marvell, was MP for Hull, while in the twentieth century the novelist Winifred Holtby based the bustling city of 'Kingsport' in her novel South Riding (1936) on the Hull of her day.