Sylvie Jane Lewis

Sylvie Jane Lewis is a funded Art and Media PhD student and published poet. Her research interests include literary modernists (including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hope Mirrlees and Sylvia Townsend Warner), early cinema and photography, gender, queerness, fantasy, and shyness. As of October 2025, she is pursuing a Techne-funded PhD titled An Archive of Fairies: Modernism, Fantasy, and Shy Ephemera 1890-1930. This doctorate will explore the presences of fairies in literary modernism and early film and photography, and utilise the fairy to reimagine archival practice. The project's central thesis statement is that the fairy in the modernist novel, as influenced by cinematic projection, embodies literary modernist shyness. In this critical reading, the imagery of the fantastical gives shape to quiet feelings where the conventions of narrative realism falter.

She is published widely as a creative (predominantly as a poet), with features in The London Magazine, Acumen, the Young Poets Network (Poetry Society), and fourteen poems, as well as being commended in prizes such as the Ware Poets Competition and the Free Verse Prize. In October 2025, she was awarded third place in the international Bridport Poetry Prize, also winning the 2025 Bridport Young Writer Award, as the highest placing young person across their various competitions. In her creative work, she is drawn to the subjects of fairy tales, the creaturely, and the ephemeral, subjects which feed into her research.