Kaja Knudsen

Kaja Knudsen is a UEA funded Creative and Critical Writing PhD student. 

In 2017 she graduated in Creative Non-Fiction Writing (Distinction) at City, University of London. Her thesis, a full-length work of non-fiction, was a psychogeographic investiagtion into the A10 road which runs from London Bridge in the City of London to King's Lynn in Norfolk. The work explored how the lives of people living along one road differ so greatly from one end of the road to the other. As well as capturing the diversity of voices along the A10 the work also investigated the sensations felt when walking from the city to the country. 

Her PhD, Ghost Species and Rural Others: The Representation of Country People in the New Nature Writing, is a critical investgation of how one of the UK's greatest publishing successes this century has engaged with and represented the people who live in the areas it celebrates, particularly the lives of the rural working class. It examines representation within the context of dominant cultural contructions of working class people as well as the work of cultural geographers who have drawn attention to issues of representation and the marginalisation of 'rural others'. 

Her creative thesis another full-length work of non-fiction is an investigation-cum-biography of a group of rural working class boys from a small town in Norfolk who defy stereotype and challenge notions of rural life and people. In the late 1990s the boys had just got dial-up, MTV and mobile phones. They had small-town dynamism and visions of a future that mirrored the lifestyles of those they admired on TV. Yet after leaving school, unmoored and with no clear path ahead of them the boys' lives tumbled into drugs, depression and, for some, death. The episodic narrative combines rural studies, memoir, nature writing and writing about the working class in small towns to create what has been described as a unique literary text.