I’ve lived away from the northwest for more than half my life, but this faded image of a shrimper’s rig has surfaced every time I think of home. It must embody what I used to feel when I was living there: the sense that I was mired in the pursuit of my own purpose, belonging on that beach but strangely out of place.
Benjamin Wood, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing
14 July 2025
King's lecturer and award-winning novelist releases fifth book
Benjamin Wood, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing in the Department of English, releases his new novel Seascraper on 17 July.
Seascraper covers a day and half in the life of Thomas Flett, a young man who aspires to be a folk singer but who is duty bound to maintain his grandfather’s working traditions as a cart shanker (a kind of shrimper) on the northwest coast. Early one afternoon, he is visited at his cottage by an American who claims to be a film director, which Thomas hopes might change his life’s trajectory for the better.
The novel is inspired by a memory of a shed on wheels – a shrimper’s rig – abandoned on the beach at Southport, where Wood grew up. Seascraper resulted from Wood’s further explorations of this memory and is set in a smaller-scale version of his hometown.
At King’s, Wood is a founder of the Creative Writing Research PhD programme, which supports writers to complete a book-length creative piece of work.
Wood’s previous novels included The Bellweather Revivals (2012), The Ecliptic (2015), A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better (2018), and The Young Accomplice (2022). He has won le Prix du Roman Fnac and le Prix Baudelaire, and been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Book Prize, Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the RSL Encore Award, the European Union Prize for Literature and the CWA Gold Dagger Award.
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Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing