User:Anne Hossat 1/sandbox

Sean Ashton (born 1971) is a writer and teacher. His books include the novels The Way to Work (Salt, 2023) and Living in a Land (Ma Bibliothèque, 2017); the poetry collection Sampler (Valley Press, 2020); and the short story collection Sunsets and Dogshits (Alma Books, 2007). He studied Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University (1991-94), sculpture at the Royal College of Art (1995-97), and completed a doctorate at Goldsmiths College, London (2000-04) on different uses of the readymade since its Duchampian inception. He worked as an artist from 1994-2004, exhibiting at Modern Art, KW Projects, Gasworks and various other galleries before choosing to focus on writing.

Ashton has contributed stories, poems and art criticism to many magazines, books and journals, including Poetry London, Oxford Poetry, Magma, the philosophy journal Collapse, Art Review (as staff writer, 2012-17) and Map Magazine(as contributing editor, 2007-2012). After leaving Art Review, he won second prize in the 2018 IAAC Awards for Art Criticism for a review of Andy Holden's Artangel commission Natural Selection. Though no longer active as an artist, he collaborates regularly with visual artists, notably on Anat Ben David's opera Kairos (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2017), for which he wrote part of the libretto; Lina Lapelyte's The Mutes (Lafayette Anticipations, 2022), a choral work for atonal singers that used excerpts from his novel Living in a Land; and the short story 'Mr Heggarty Goes Down' (Collapse VIII), illustrated by the painter Nigel Cooke. Ashton recorded a spoken-word LP of Living in a Land in 2020 for the art/literary journal Inscription.

Ashton's fiction falls roughly into three categories: traditional narrative texts with plot and character; texts that dispense with plot and focus on a mantra-like repetition of phrases and words in order to generate a voice; and texts where the author asserts himself as a 'metafictional' device. An example of the first isThe Way to Work, a conventionally plotted novel concerning the salesman of a cat litter manufacturer who finds his morning train diverted to Purgatory. An example of the second is Living in a Land, the memoir of a hypothetical citizen who can only construct sentences in the negative, and who is therefore only able to say what he has never done in his life. Examples of the third are his first book, the short story collection Sunsets and Dogshits, a number of pieces on imaginary artworks and books, written as reviews for fictional journals in the persona of an art critic; and his poetry collection Sampler, which presents itself as a 'sampler' of entries from an imaginary encyclopaedia written entirely by poets, with Ashton acting as chief editor.

Since 2008, Ashton has worked as a lecturer on the Fine Art undergraduate course at Leeds Beckett University, and at the Royal College of Art.