Writing on the Verge of Prophecy: An Interview with Philip Terry
by Tony White
I’ve enjoyed working with the students and getting to know the place a little better. I even found a way to sneak in, through a maze of kitchens and storerooms, to the still iconic Hexagon: a large freestanding Brutalist pillar, housing a single high-ceilinged and galleried space that once functioned as the University dining room, but which at time of writing is currently mothballed. In 1971 the Hexagon was the 9p stamp in a series of Royal Mail commemoratives depicting Modern University Buildings. The idea that university buildings might be sufficient source of national pride to feature on postage stamps seems quaint amid today’s neoliberal dash to the bottom: the accelerating closures, cuts, and restructures to Humanities departments taking place across the country in recent years and months.
A major restructure now of Essex University, announced at the end of 2025, has seen demands for huge cuts (‘savings envelopes’ in the euphemistic jargon) from all departments, and the closure of the University’s Southend Campus. And now, to open up more staffing and teaching capacity, the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies (LiFTS for short) are being moved temporarily from one side of Square 4 to another. It’s rumoured that The Hexagon may be brought back into active service to accommodate the incoming students from Southend.
That’s why Philip Terry is in today, sorting through papers and packing up his office. Knowing we’d both be here, I’d suggested that perhaps we should record a quick interview.
‘Sure,’ says Philip, as we chat variously about the recent death of translator and Georges Perec biographer David Bellos, about the politician Enoch Powell once visiting the Essex University campus to read his poetry (Philip has unearthed a press clipping from a local newspaper), and about a divinatory quality in the writings of Italo Calvino.
Philip Terry has been teaching a course at Essex University on Oulipo — the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle — since 2003. We first met when the then Professor (now Dame) Marina Warner introduced us following publication in 2012 of my Oulipo-inspired novella Dicky Star and the Garden Rule, and as a result Philip had invited me to come and discuss the book with his students.
Dicky Star… (which is now out of print) was written to test whether a particular variation of an Oulipian lexical constraint, namely using historical crossword solutions as a ‘mandated vocabulary’, would work at the level of a novella or novel. Not a foregone conclusion by any means, but it did work, and so laid the ground for my latest novels, The Fountain in the Forest (2018) and Phantom at the Feast (2026). Each of the ninety chapters across the two novels is written using all the solutions to successive Guardian ‘Quick Crosswords’ from 1985. More recently, I’d reviewed his compendious and comprehensive Penguin Book of Oulipo (2018) for the Guardian.
While he packs, Philip tells me that his latest novel includes descriptions of a Professor Blanc having to empty his office. ‘I’m not Professor Blanc,’ he says. ‘I had no idea this would be happening.’
How did you first become interested in the work of Oulipo and in translating? I'm also interested in how these two pursuits may have fed each other.
That’s a good question, Tony, and the answer to it lies in one of the books I’ve just packed into this box. I hope you don’t mind if I carry on packing, I’ve got to be out of this office by the end of the week. Long-short, my first teaching job was at the Université de Caen in the late 1980s. Teaching in France you get a long lunch hour, two hours to be precise, and in one of my lunch hours I went into FNAC in the centre of town, and one of the books they had on display, was, let me see, yes, here it is, a Gallimard paperback of Oulipo, La littérature potentielle. I’d never heard of Oulipo, but two of the writers on the cover were Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, two of my favourite writers at the time, and I immediately thought that if there was a literary group that had Perec and Calvino as members, I wanted to know more, so I bought it at once. That’s how I first became interested in Oulipo. My interest in translation came later, but it maybe has its origins in Oulipo too, for one of the things they talk about in this book is what they call ‘homolinguistic translation‘. That’s translating already existing texts in your own language into different texts in the same language, by removing the e’s, say, what Oulipo call ‘lipogrammatic translation’, or changing all the nouns, as in their method N+7, where you substitute the nouns seven places on in the dictionary: ‘To be or not to be, that is the quiche.’
When did you start the Oulipo course at University of Essex and why?
I came to Essex in 2003 after a spell teaching English and Creative Writing at the University of Plymouth. I remember asking some of my students at Plymouth to play around with Oulipo, leaving out letters, and the external examiner thought this was really eccentric and had nothing to do with Creative Writing. When I came to Essex, though, to set up a new degree in Creative Writing, I was entering a Department that historically had been a Department of Comparative Literature, and I figured this would be a good environment in which to introduce Oulipo, as a different approach to Creative Writing. And I thought it would make our degree a bit different from some others, a bit more experimental from the outset. When I suggested this nobody batted an eyelid, so the course got the go ahead. I think my approach at the time was just to throw everything I’d got at the students, lipograms, Oulipian algorithms, N+7, snowballs — where the number of letters or words in a poetic line increases by one for each successive line — and so on. The students loved it, though it took a while to recruit large numbers as nobody knew what it was.
Have broader attitudes towards the work of Oulipo changed since that time?
Yes. Oulipo has become better known, for one thing, and their methods have been picked up by a lot of poets in particular. Writers like Evie Shockley, Lee Ann Brown and Christian Bök in the US and Canada, and Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Tim Atkins and Nicky Melville over here. And a handful of novelists, including yourself, and Richard Beard, who as well as writing novels has used Oulipian structures in his recently launched collective memoir project The Universal Turing Machine, where he uses a grid structure a bit like in Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual for writers to organise memoirs. And Alec Finlay used Perec’s I Remember, which I translated, for his Scotland Covid Memorial project. I’ve played my own part in this, for when I started teaching Oulipo, I quickly realised that many of the key books weren’t available in English, so I’ve translated some of them, including Raymond Queneau’s Elementary Morality, Perec’s I Remember, which I’ve mentioned, and maybe most influential of all, The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which has lots of Oulipian writings, including a music score by Perec, which weren’t previously available. So that’s another way my practice as a translator intersects with my interests in Oulipo: when I’ve been involved in translation, or conventional translation, rather than experimental translation, it’s often been to translate Oulipian work from French.
Can you say something firstly about the value to students of a course in Oulipo? And second what you've learned?
The value to students is in part that it’s enabled students to see that writing can be fun, and it can overcome writer’s block, as it did for Perec when he wrote his novel without any e’s, La disparition — or A Void, in Gilbert Adair’s translation. If you ask students to write something without the lettter e, they are so focussed on this that they forget about their anxieties in approaching the blank page. They stop worrying about plot and character and whether or not they have anything to say and they just write. And some of our students, once they give it a go, have taken Oulipo in interesting and new directions, doing PhDs where they’ve invented their own writing algorithms, or explored the possibilities of Oulipian theatre, or Oulipian film, or experimental translation. Some students have gone on to set up presses, like Simon Everett’s Muscaliet Press, and some have published some really exciting work, like Eliza O’Toole’s poetic sequence on endangered British moths, Red Fifty Five, where she uses alphabetical and other constraints.
For me, working with Oulipo has become pretty central to my writing practice, and I sometimes wonder if I’d ever have written anything at all without Oulipo. Having said that, I tend not to take something Oulipo have already done and just do it in English, I try to bring something new to the table. So in my Dante’s Inferno, which relocates Dante to present-day Essex and the University of Essex, as well as using the Oulipian translation method ‘up-to-date’, from Harry Mathews, the book also meshes with psychogeographical practice, superimposing a map of one place, here Dante’s Hell, onto another, the Essex University campus. This may sound arbitrary, but it isn’t — the architecture of the Essex campus is modelled on the towers of the medieval Italian city states, towers which form part of the iconography of Dante’s Hell. Another work indebted to Oulipo is The Lascaux Notebooks Trans. by Philip Terry, my conjuring of Ice Age poems from the signs at Lascaux. Here, the key was the discovery of a 3x3 grid in the caves, which I filled with signs, also taken from the caves, to create a machine for generating poems. It’s very close to what Oulipo call ‘combinatory literature’, as in Queneau’s flip-book, A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, but the generative structure is not a given, it emerges from the caves themselves. Both these works you could describe as experimental translations, or expanded translations, and both try to push the boundaries of what we understand as translation.
Are you working on a translation at the moment?
As it happens, yes, a translation of Baudelaire. Hang on a second. How’s your back? Could you just give me a hand with this box? Perfect. So, the Baudelaire, this is pretty much a ‘straight’ translation, not an experimental one, or a ‘trans-shifting’ in Alice Oswald’s phrase. I guess that over the years, as I’ve done more translation, people have started to see me as in part a translator, and this one came out of the blue as a commission from Pushkin Press. They asked for an ‘Essential Baudelaire’, so I’ve put together a selection from The Flowers of Evil and the prose poems, and one of his letters that’s a bit like a story, it describes a dream that takes place in a brothel. This has been a really exciting project, especially as I used dictionaries that were contemporary with Baudelaire, and found that a lot of translations miss some key things in the poems. One of these is the way Baudelaire often alludes, sometimes obliquely, to the workings of Capitalism in the poems, which for Derrida is one of Baudelaire’s key subjects. He writes not just about Paris, the capital city, in a word, but about capital as commerce. So in his poem ‘Metamorphoses of the Vampire’ the vampire approaches the poet for a ‘provision’ of blood in the French. Most translators use the expected word, the vampire ‘sucks’ blood, but the word used by Baudelaire has connotations relating to trade, to providing goods for a warehouse, so I translate this as the Vampire ‘stocked up’ on blood.
What is your position on translating Oulipian texts: do you translate the constraint or the resulting text on the page — or some combination of both.
I always translate the constraint, just as Adair keeps the lipogram in A Void, otherwise it’s no longer Oulipo. Of course, doing this you can end up with a completely different text, word for word, but it’s still truer to the original. One example would be the way Perec in his short text, ‘A Little Illustrated ABC’, generates meanings by homophones, or homophonic translation. Basically his starting point is a series of nonsense phrases using the alphabet: ‘Ba-be-bi-bo-bu’, ‘Ca-ce-ci-co-cu’ etc. Perec’s next step is to translate these into phrases which more or less make sense, then finally he conjures a short narrative out of the result. I can’t remember off the top of my head what Perec gets from ‘Ba-be-bi-bo-bu’, but working with this in English I got the phrase: ‘Barbie: buy bow (blue)’, then I conjured a story out of that. It’s completely different to Perec’s story, but it works.
Your current work-in-progress is inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities — can you tell me more?
It’s a kind of novel. It all started on Aldeburgh beach – one of my favourite places – when I was reading Invisible Cities, and I started playing around with the Calvino and turning his fantastic stories about Venice into stories or fables about universities. I ended up with stories about universities on the moon or in the sun, universities run by anarchists, universities where the current obsession with transparency was reflected in a university made entirely of glass, or of transparent materials, down to the electric cables and the floors and walls of the student accommodation blocks. Of course, to turn it into a novel I needed more than this, so I constructed a framing narrative, which begins with a university restructuring, where the Department of Literature is closed down and reopened as the Department of Journalism, Games Writing, and Marketing, JoGMa for short. I started this around three years ago, and ironically now it’s all coming true in a way. The university is going through a restructuring where it’s cutting 200 academic jobs — that’s why I’m leaving – and the same again in administration. And our Department will be merging with Language and Linguistics under a new title, the School of Language, Literature and Media, I think, or something along those lines, SLLaM for short. I was about to say you couldn’t make it up, but I kind of did. Then on the other hand I wasn’t really thinking about Essex, but about other universities that were closing down their Creative Writing programmes at the time, such as Roehampton.
I learned of this new work, because in recent months as the University announced the current restructure, you shared glimpses of these Invisible Universities in emails to colleagues. It was partly our shared interest in Calvino that prompted me to propose this interview.
Oh, I’d completely forgotten that. It’s not very like me, but you’re right. I sent one or two of my ‘Invisible Universities’ round the Department email list, just because they uncannily ended up describing the situation we appeared to be in. Some of my colleagues thought I was taking things badly, but that isn’t the case at all.
And speaking about coincidences, you were saying that one of your characters, Professor Le Blanc, happens to be moving office in the novel.
That’s right. It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? But writing is always on the verge of prophecy. Le Blanc, in my novel, is a character who is kind of old school, and when the Department is no longer a Department of Literature, this is the last straw for him. He resigns. And as he’s packing up his office and drafting his letter of resignation, and — strictly against regulations, puffing away on his pipe — the other characters chat to him about the Department in the old days. His chapters are a bit like the novels of Thomas Bernhard, in that he tends to unload a lot of angst in endless monologues, against marketing teams, the corporatisation of the sector, metrics and so on. I had some fun with these sections, but while I now find I’m packing my books away into boxes myself, the comparison ends there.