Stuart Estell

Stuart Estell (1993, English) is a pianist, performer and music reviewer as well as a novelist and poet.

He has been a choral conductor, orchestral tuba player, musical director of an amateur operatic society, guitar noise terrorist, concertina teacher, brass band member and folk singer at various times. His particular interest is in playing New Music – especially Morton Feldman, Elliott Carter, and Webern.

Stuart is very interested in writing and particularly collaborative working as a way of creating community – whether that’s a community of readers, or a collaborative community of artists that work towards the same goal. Recently he has been experimenting with collaborative performances of various kinds. You can listen on YouTube here: ORE with KK Null.

Stuart’s first book, Verucca Music, published in 2011, is part memoir, part novel, part prose poem – ‘an absurdist comedy of the very blackest kind, informed by a love of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Peter Cook and The Goon Show.’

Some of his poems have been published on the Year Zero Writers website. Together with Lucy Newlyn, he is a founder member of the Hall Writers’ Forum, which was launched in Oxford on 9 February 2013. As well as contributing actively to the Forum, he regularly attends our writing events.

“As a society at large we seem to have lost the will to celebrate creative difference. You don’t ignite the creative spirit by force-feeding a young mind with standardised garbage in management-consultancy-speak – you just weigh it down with mediocrity until its only ambition is to audition for instant obscurity on the X-Factor. Brave new world, indeed. Education should and must be a time of exploration, not the cold, hard, miserable facts of Gradgrind and Gove.”

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Creative Writing

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English Language and Literature

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