Edward Picot

I was born in 1958. Originally I come from Hertfordshire in the UK, but I now live in Kent, with my wife and one daughter. In 1992 I was awarded a Ph.D in English Literature, and in 1997 I published my thesis in book-form, under the title Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945. Since the year 2000, when I set up my first website, I've been working in the health service and self-publishing online in my spare time. I started my second website, The Hyperliterature Exchange, in 2003: it's a review and directory of hyperliterature for sale on the Web, with links to the places where it can be bought. I try to publish something new every month: it used to be a piece of criticism one month, followed by a piece of creative work the next, but I haven't been able to stick to that schedule for a while now. All the same, it still feels very important to me to balance my creative work with occasional critical essays. Many of my recent creative pieces have been either entirely or partially inspired by the games I play with my daughter Rachel. They therefore feature a lot of jokes and toys. Online, the groups with which I have been most heavily involved have been the WebArtery group (groups.yahoo.com/group/webartery/); the TrAce organisation (which I published several articles for when it was still based in Nottingham at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/); Regina Celia Pinto's Museum of the Essential (and Beyond That), which has a gallery at http://www.arteonline.arq.br/and a newsletter at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/museum_newsletter/; Furtherfield and its associated chat-site Netbehaviour (Furtherfield has co-published most of my recent criticism along with The Hyperliterature Exchange); and DVblog, a video site co-run by my friend Michael Szpakowski which has reproduced a lot of my video work recently. These communities have been inspirational and supportive to me over a period of several years, and through them I have formed a number of online friendships with other artists and critics. If you've never come across hyperliterature and would like to know more, please visit my links page. Your comments, and suggestions for the links page, are always welcome.

(Source: edwardpicot.com)