Tony Brignull
Tony Brignull (2002, English) has won more awards for his copywriting than any other British writer. He is also a poet and short-story writer.
His awards include sixteen silver Design and Art direction awards and three golds, largely while working for clients such as Parker, Birds Eye, Army Officer recruitment, Cinzano, Clarks shoes and the Great Ormond Street Wishing Well appeal. He was creative director and copywriter at Collett, Dickenson, Pearce and DDB London, before taking his degree in English at the Hall as a mature student.
His poetry and short stories have won three international awards – two in the Chiltern Open and one in the Transatlantic Review. He has published one book of poetry, Where the Rail Ends and is preparing a second, Before A, after Z. He has also written regular columns for The Guardian and Campaign magazine. While at the Hall he won the Graham Midgley prize for poetry and contributed to Synergies. Then, at King’s College London, he gained a distinction for his dissertation on the Romantic biographer, Richard Holmes, as part of his MPhil.
He currently contributes pieces on Buddhism and Advaita to Contact, the magazine of the Study Society in London. He is also an active member of the Hall Writers’ Forum, where his poems attract a large following.
“Creative writing should not be part of the curriculum in my view, but of the culture (especially at St Edmund Hall), something to which students of English happily subscribe. A thing of duty is a bore forever, but creativity, when given into freely and wholeheartedly, learning and loving the disciplines of a genre, enriches everyone.”
“Creativity, when given into freely and wholeheartedly, enriches everyone.”