A Brief Biography Of Nicolas Tredell
Nicolas Tredell is a writer on literature, culture and film. His tally of published work includes 25 books and over 450 essays, articles, interviews, introductions, tales and obituaries in English and American books, journals and newspapers. He is a frequent speaker, in person and online, at a wide variety of venues, most recently, Reading School, Graveney School, the University of Bucharest, Berhampur University, the University of Oradea, Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, University of Lisbon and Jadavpur University, Kalkata. Nicolas taught literature, film and cultural studies at Sussex University from 1984 to 2004. He lives in Seaford, East Sussex.
Early Life and Education
Nicolas Samuel Tredell was born in Leicester on 11 January 1950 to Walter Tredell, a hosiery export manager at the Wolsey hosiery factory, and Frances Elizabeth Tredell (née Kirk), a former shoe operative at the Wheatsheaf Works, He was their second son. Their first son, David Charles Tredell, had been born on 28 September 1941. A daughter, Jacqueline Helen Tredell, would be born on 13 March 1955. When Nicolas was 18 months old the family moved to West Ewell in Surrey where he started his formal education in the local primary school. Following the death of his older brother David from hydrocephalus and meningitis on 21 November 1956, the family moved back to Leicester, finally settling in Groby [pron. Groo-bee], a large village 5 miles North-West of the city, where Nicolas completed his primary education at the village school. He passed his 11-Plus exam and went to King Edward VII Grammar School in Coalville. He stayed on into the Sixth Form and took A Levels in English, French and History; he and Robert Eggington formed the school debating team that reached the quarter-final of the 1968 County Cup competition. Robert (Bob) would later become the first project director of the BBC Online News website. In 1968 Nicolas sat the Oxford entrance exam and was offered a place at Balliol, but he decided to follow a different path. While pursuing a programme of private study in literature, philosophy and psychology, he worked at various local jobs including being a village postman and working as a hospital driver and porter in Groby Road Hospital. He moved to London in the early 1970s.
London in The Seventies
Nicolas worked in a variety of jobs in London including serving on the Cheese Counter in Selfridges, as an Audio-Visual Assistant/Driver for the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Social Medicine, St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School (where he met his future wife, Angela Moreen Clark, whom he married in 1975) and as a Civil Service Officer in the Welfare Department of the British Museum.
Sussex by the Sea
In 1975 Nicolas returned to his scholastic studies with a 3-year course, English major subject and History minor subject, at Eastbourne College of Education which later became East Sussex College of Higher Education. He was awarded a BA degree by Sussex University. A key part of his studies was the production of a dissertation on Colin Wilson, a writer whose work Nicolas had been interested in since his discovery, in his early teens, of Wilson’s books, for example The Outsider (1956) and Ritual In The Dark (1960). This dissertation would later become Nicolas’s first published book, The Novels of Colin Wilson (1982). A second expanded edition of this was released by Maurice Bassett as an e-book in 2004 under the title Existence and Evolution: The Novels of Colin Wilson. A third edition, further expanded to cover all Wilson’s published fiction, appeared as Novels to Some Purpose: The Fiction of Colin Wilson, in 2015.
In 1978 Nicolas went on from East Sussex College of Higher Education to study for an MA in Modern Literature Since 1850 at the University of Kent at Canterbury where he wrote a dissertation on the 19th Century poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. This became his first published peer-reviewed scholarly essay which appeared in the journal Victorian Poetry in 1982.
Further studies included a year at the University of Surrey, where he obtained a PGCEA (Post Graduate Certificate in the Education of Adults). He also gained a Diploma in Continuing Education from the University of Sussex.
PN Review
In 1981 Nicolas had his first review published in PN Review which was the beginning of a writing relationship which is continuing in 2024.
Nicolas contributed a great deal of material over the next 43 years - 13 Essays, 20 Essay-reviews, 98 Reviews and 16 Obituaries. On 29th November 2023 Nicolas was a presence at the event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Carcanet Press.
An essay on Raymond Williams, Nicolas wrote in response to Williams’ death in 1988, published in 4 parts in PN Review developed into Uncancelled Challenge: The Work of Raymond Williams (1990).
Nicolas was a Contributing Editor from 1983-9 and in 1986 he was responsible for co-ordinating the PN Review Special Issue A New Orthodoxy?
A number of essays that Nicolas had written for PN Review on the developments in Critical Theory and Practice, together with other related essays, were published as a book, The Critical Decade: Culture In Crisis, by Carcanet Press in 1993.
During the period 1990-94, Nicolas carried out interviews with key literary practitioners and theorists, most of which were published in PN Review. At the end of the series these and others were collected into a book Conversations With Critics published by Carcanet Press in 1994. This featured John Barrell, Catherine Belsey, Bernard Bergonzi, Christine Brooke-Rose, Dame A. S, Byatt, David Caute, Brian Cox, Donald Davie, Terry Eagleton, Stephen Heath, Robert Hewison, Richard Hoggart, Lisa Jardine, Sir Frank Kermode, Colin MacCabe, Karl Miller, Sir Roger Scruton, C. H. Sisson CH, George Steiner, and Dame Marina Warner. A New and Revised Edition in 2015 included further interviews carried out in the later 20th and the early 21st century with Philip Hobsbaum and Raymond Tallis.
An interesting offshoot of these interviews was when Faber & Faber asked Nicolas to be one of the three judges of the 1994 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Poetry on the recommendation of Karl Miller whom Nicolas had interviewed in 1990. The other two judges were Hugo Williams and Helen Dunmore. The prize was awarded to John Burnside for his volume of poems Feast Days and Nicolas gave the speech at the award ceremony.
Teaching at Sussex University
From 1984 to 2004 Nicolas taught on a range of courses at Sussex University. These included a BA Cultural Studies, European Cinema and European Identities course; and the Media Studies Certificate, which he also convened. With practising and prospective teachers from the Seychelles on the B.Ed Literature and Culture course Nicolas explored canonical English writers such as Shakespeare, John Donne, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Joseph Conrad and a selection of international writing in English by authors like Sam Selvon, Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.
For several summers Nicolas was a member of the small team teaching on the English in the Vacation International Summer School directed by the late Professor Ladislaus Löb. Many countries, for example Israel, Japan, Turkey, Greece, Poland, Germany, were represented by the students, of a variety of ages, who attended this. Texts studied included Separate Tables, The History Boys, Pygmalion, Mrs Dalloway and Ian McEwan’s Saturday.
Online Literary Encyclopedia
In 2004 Nicolas started contributing articles on writers and individual literary works to the online Literary Encyclopedia. His work in this field is still continuing and up to June 2024 there were 127 articles by him in the Encyclopedia. He has provided comprehensive coverage of the novels of Colin Wilson and the works of authors such as Martin Amis, C. P. Snow, Laura Del-Rivo, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alan Sillitoe and David Storey.
Contributing Essays to Anthologies
In 1997 Nicolas contributed five essays to the anthology of Gay and Lesbian Biography on W. H. Auden, Frances Bacon, John Cage, Emily Dickinson and David Hockney. Essays by Nicolas on eleven writers were included in the 2001 anthology Contemporary Novelists. These ranged from A. N. Wilson to Terry Pratchett and J. M. Coetzee to Stephen King. Nicolas wrote 17 essays for the 2003 Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature. Among the writers covered were Malcolm Bradbury, Christine Brooke-Rose, L. P. Hartley, J. B. Priestley, Anne Stevenson and Marina Warner.
Nicolas contributed essays to four volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. These were Volume 194 (1998) Colin Wilson, Graham Swift; Volume 231 (2001) Ann Quin, David Caute; Volume 326 (2003) The Ghost Road (1995) by Pat Barker, Saville (1976) by David Storey; Volume 271 (2003) Brian Aldiss, Simon Raven.
Pioneering Publications
Nicolas has produced three monographs that could be considered to be pioneering publications: Caute’s Confrontations: The Novels of David Caute (1994), the first and, so far, only monograph on David Caute; Fighting Fictions: The Novels of B. S. Johnson, the first monograph on B. S. Johnson (2004, 2nd revised and updated edition 2010), and C. P. Snow: The Dynamics of Hope (2012) of which a reviewer said “this could become the general introduction to Snow studies for the next academic generation”.
Icon
Nicolas’s first book in the Icon A Readers’ Guide to Essential Criticism series, on The Great Gatsby, was published in 1997. This was followed by Great Expectations (1998) and Heart of Darkness (1998), In 1998 he was asked to be the Consultant Editor of the series to extend and develop the series by identifying significant texts, writers and genres for volume content and finding and supporting appropriately qualified authors.
Palgrave Macmillan
In the early 21st century Icon sold their Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism series to Palgrave Macmillan where it became the Palgrave Macmillan Readers Guides to Essential Criticism series. Nicolas as Consultant Editor of the series was part of the deal. By the end of 2020 this series consisted of 89 volumes of which eight volumes had been produced by Nicolas; in addition to the three referred to in the previous paragraph, these were The Sound and the Fury/As I Lay Dying (1999); The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000); Macbeth (2006); A Midsummer Night's Dream (2010); and Shakespeare - The Tragedies (2014).
Bloomsbury
In Autumn 2021 the Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism series was sold to Bloomsbury Academic and Nicolas continued as Consultant Editor under the Red Globe Press imprint. In 2023 there were further editorial changes within Bloomsbury at which point Nicolas felt it was a good opportunity to move on to focus on new projects.
English and Media Centre
In 2008 Nicolas started his association with the English and Media Centre (EMC). He has made several contributions to EMC’s rich range of resources for A Level English and Media teachers and their students, for example video clips, articles in the EMC e-magazine and lectures in person and electronically for EMC’s programme of Continuing Professional Development for teachers on both aspects of English Literature and also individual texts. His most recent article for the e-magazine is on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
He was the judge of the English and Media Centre 2016 Close Reading Competition. He performed this role again in June 2024.
Conferences
Conferences have been a significant arena for Nicolas to share his love and knowledge of English and American Literature. Nicolas has given several lectures at English and Media Centre Annual Conferences for 6th Form students and their teachers including ones on The Great Gatsby and on Narrative Voice. He also gave the Keynote Lecture on The Great Gatsby at the American Literature 1880-1940 Conference at Godolphin and Latymer School on 23 March 2017.
Nicolas was co-organiser of the Literary London Society Conferences "Conflict and Resolution" (2018) and "Neighbours of Ours" (2019) where he presented papers. He has also contributed reviews to the Literary London Society Journal.
Nicolas presented papers at the First (2016) and Second (2018) International Colin Wilson Conferences at the University of Nottingham.
Nicolas has given Keynote Lectures at four Annual International Conference of the English Department at the University of Bucharest, Romania. These were AICED-19 (2017) – Birth, Death and Rebirth; AICED-21 (2019) – Trauma, Narrative, Responsibility.
Lectures and Day Schools
Nicolas has been a popular speaker at a variety of venues on a wide range of subjects. He has been invited to speak on The Great Gatsby at a number of schools for example, Ardingly College; Abbey School, Reading; Sir Robert Woodard Academy, Lancing; Reading School (25 April 2017; 27 February 2018; 27 February 2019; 3 March 2020).
A different aspect of his literary interests was when he talked on Thomas Hardy’s poetry at the new Towner art gallery in Eastbourne in 2009. He had previously given talks at the old Towner Art Gallery on such artists as the Pre-Raphaelites, Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Rubens.
His most recent talk on art was one on Rubens and Rembrandt for the Society of Eastbourne Artists’ Lenora Houchin Memorial Evening on 17 November 2017.
Nicolas was a frequent speaker at the Tuesday Afternoon Lectures at the Friends Centre, Brighton where he gave talks on a wide range of literary and artistic subjects.
Nicolas did a number of lectures and Day Schools for the WEA including one on the Bloomsbury Group. He also did an event on the Bloomsbury Group at the public library in Lewes.
Salem Press
Nicolas started writing essays for volumes in the Critical Approaches to Literature and Critical Insights series in 2017. The essays with an English and American focus span the whole historical range from Homer to Zadie Smith. The coverage of Nicolas’s contributions is extensive with essays on prominent women writers such as Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston and prominent male writes such as Milton, Shakespeare. Arthur Miller, Ralph Ellison, John Steinbeck and Martin Amis. Nicolas also contributed essays on the rhetoric of key American political figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Malcolm X, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King. Nicolas then progressed to editing three volumes in the Critical Insights series – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (February 2020); The Kite Runner (June 2020); In Cold Blood (October 2020) – to which he also contributed essays. He has since contributed to two more Critical Insights volumes on the topic Power and Corruption and on Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility.
Online Presence
During the COVID- 19 Pandemic Nicolas responded to the restrictions by establishing a powerful online presence, reaching worldwide audiences.
The Great Gatsby – CPD Study Day
On 22 September 2020 Nicolas gave a lecture on The Great Gatsby, via Zoom, at a Study Day in the English & Media Centre’s Continuous Professional Development programme for teachers.
The Waste Land at Berhampur University, India
On 29 November 2020 Nicolas provided a Lecture and Q&A session on The Waste Land: Trauma and Healing via Google Meet for Berhampur University Distinguished Lecture Series, Lecture No 5, at Berhampur University, Odisha, India.
In Cold Blood Podcast
On15 December 2020 Nicolas had an Interview with Timothy Joseph, an American Criminologist based in Indiana, via Cisco Webex for a Criminal Behaviorology podcast on the subject of A Critical Look at In Cold Blood: The True Crime Novel as a Work of Literature.
Gatsby at Shakespeare’s School
On 10 February 2021 Nicolas conducted an online session, via Microsoft Teams, - Lecture and Q&A – on The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia, The Age of Innocence, The Grapes of Wrath for King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Writing The Crisis at University of Oradea, Romania
On 19 March 2021 Nicolas gave a Keynote Lecture at the 7th Biennial Conference Cultural Texts and Contents in the English Speaking World (held online via Zoom) for the Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Letters in the University of Oradea, Romania. Writing the Crisis: Texts and Contexts in Interesting Times draws on a wide span of literature from the Bible to Doris Lessing.
Tredellian Press
In July 2021 Nicolas, with his wife Angela, set up Tredellian Press – a small independent publishing company to produce booklets of texts outside the remit of larger publishers. In 2023 Tredellian Press became an imprint of Tredellian Publishing Ltd. By the end of 2023 Tredellian Press had produced twenty-five booklets including poems and short stories by Nicolas’s father, Walter Tredell, and a range of texts by Nicolas himself – Keynote Lectures, short stories and novellas, a radio play and a comprehensive bibliography of Nicolas’s oeuvre. Further volumes are scheduled for publication throughout 2024.
Continuing Online Presence
Having built up a strong online presence during the COVID-19 restrictions Nicolas continued to develop and extend his online presence even when the COVID-19 restrictions were being lifted.
English and Media Centre (EMC)
Nicolas has done two lectures, via Zoom, in EMC’s CPD (Continuous Professional Development) Twilight Session series for teachers. On 26 January 2022 his lecture was Pairing Passing and The Great Gatsby and on 11 October 2022 it was Keep Up With The Kite Runner.
Conferences
Nicolas gave presentations at two further conferences organized by the University of Bucharest, Romania - AICED-23 International Conference (2-4 June 2022), where he delivered a Keynote Lecture on Disaster Discourse: Representations of Catastrophe and AICED-24 International Conference (9-11 June 2023) on ‘Humour and Pathos in Literature and the Arts’ where he gave an invited paper on "Tears of a Clown".
Nicolas also delivered an invited lecture on "Ministries for the Future: Vision and Interfusion in the Anthropocene" at a conference organized by Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India - International Conference on ‘Global Anthropo-scene: Rethinking Sustainability and Cultural Reservations’. (30 - 31 January 2024).
Discussion – ‘The Great American Novel: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald’
On 14 September 2022 Nicolas took part in a discussion on The Great Gatsby with Professors William Blazek, Sarah Churchwell, Lee Oser for the National Association of Scholars.
Reading School Book Festival
Nicolas gave lectures on The Great Gatsby to 6th Formers studying English Literature A Level as part of the annual Reading School Book Festival on 9 March 2023 – The Great Gatsby: Losing The Old Warm World and 14th March 2024 – The Great Gatsby and The Sound and The Fury.
In-Person Appearances Again
With the gradual lifting of the COVID-19 restrictions Nicolas was able to resume giving lectures in person again.
Schools
Three schools were the first to reap the benefits of this when their 6th formers studying English Literature A Level were entertained by lectures on The Great Gatsby. These were Graveney School, Tooting on 8 December 2021 - The Great Gatsby and The Age Of Innocence; Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, Amersham on 8 February 2022 - The Great Gatsby and Love and Reading School on 8 March 2022 – The Great Gatsby.
Conferences
Nicolas travelled to Portugal in September 2022 to give a Keynote Lecture at the International Conference on ‘The Street and the City IV – Moments’ organized by the University of Lisbon (7 - 9 September 2022). Nicolas’s lecture Visions of the Street – Transformative Moments In The City dealt with imaginative literature by writers of a variety of nationalities from the late 18th/early19th Century English poet and visual artist William Blake to the 20th-Century Portuguese poet and prose writer Fernando Pessoa.
In June 2024 Nicolas was able to visit Romania again for the AICED-25 International Conference organised by the University of Bucharest on Space and Time in Literature and the Arts (14 -16 June 2024). Nicolas’s Keynote Lecture for this conference was Visions of the Future, Remembrance of Things Past, and Long Perspectives: From Dickens to Larkin. He also chaired a final panel of the Conference on “Expectation, Nostalgia and Regret in Literary and Artistic Space/Time”.
Thanksgiving Day Lunch
On 30 November 2023 Nicolas gave a talk on The Great Gatsby at the annual Thanksgiving Day lunch of the English Speaking Union (ESU), Eastbourne. Nicolas dedicated this talk to his great friend Andrew Forrest who had commissioned him to do this talk but who had tragically been killed in a Hit and Run in Eastbourne on 26 July 2023.
Updated 1 July 2024
