Craig Jordan-Baker

Craig is a working-class writer originally from Thornhill estate in Southampton. He was the first person in his immediate family to go to university and struggled through school with undiagnosed dyslexia, as well as behavioural problems that nearly led to him being expelled. With an abiding interest in language, history and philosophy, he studied Creative Writing and Critical Theory before going on to obtain a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sussex, where his thesis focussed on the how linguistics as a science has understood the nature of language and linguistic communities.

His first novel The Nacullians (2020) is a non-linear episodic narrative focussing on the lives of three-generations of a working-class Anglo-Irish family living in a southern English city. As well as being autobiographically influenced, the work is heavily informed by psychogeography and literary modernism, The Irish Times calling it, 'a multi-layered treatise on memory and the stories we tell ourselves'.

His second book If the River is Hidden (2022) is a non-fiction collaboration with poet Cherry Smyth about a 2021 pilgrimage along the Bann, Northern Ireland’s longest river. It was supported by a grant from Arts Council Northern Ireland and was the Republic of Consciousness Prize book of the month in February 2023. A performance version of the book including live music and audio-visual elements featured prominently in the 2023 Belfast Book Festival, Skibbereen Arts Festival and the Southbank Centre’s Poetry International ‘Green Words’ event. Natural historian and poet Mary Montague called it ‘moving and vital work, resonant and ripe for our time’ and Neil Hegarty in The Irish Times praised it as an ‘innovative, deeply imagined, and delicately wrought book’. An audiobook version, recoded by the authors and internationally respected flautist Eimear McGeown was released by Spiracle Audiobooks in 2023.

Craig has a background in writing for the stage and has had many plays produced both semi-professionally and professionally around the UK. Notably, his adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf won broad praise and an IdeasTap Brighton Fringe Award, as well as having a tour which was supported by ACE funding. His children’s show The Tale of Tommy O’Quire was shortlisted for Camp Bestival Family Fringe Award and in his former life as a teenage poet, he was a commended in the Simon Alvin Young poet of the Year Award. He has worked for heritage organisations such as The Booth Museum of Natural History, the National Archives and the Royal Pavilion on a variety of research-based writing commissions, as well as having published nature and arts journalism for outlets including Resurgence and Ecologist, Urthona and New Writing South.