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. 

Her PhD, Ghost Species and Rural Others: The Representation of Rural Working-Class 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. The study provides a contemporary re-examination of Raymond Williams' canonical The Country and The City (1973) where he identified tropes in country writing that obscured the political and economic reality of the lives of the rural working-class. 

The accompanying creative work is creative non-fiction book which explores the stories of a group of boys from the Norfolk Fens. Through an examination of their lives, the project explores contemporary local, rural issues, including geographical inequality, crime, residual stereotypes about rural people, intensive farming and restrictive land access as well as unconventional, often private, acts of resistance and rebellion. The work unpicks how the lives of the boys were intertwined with their rural circumstances and looks at the enduring impact of the relationships of our youth, especially in rural and margainlised places.