unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag. My guest in this episode is Robert Hampson, Professor Emeritus in English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he began teaching in 1973. Robert has dedicated a very large chunk of his career to studying Joseph Conrad, the author who’s probably best known for his novel Heart of Darkness (1899). Robert tells me about two of his unfinished work on Conrad. One is a possible further critical monograph on Conrad, and the other is a recent Ukrainian edition of Conrad’s works for which Robert wrote the introduction. Two volumes of this edition were published before the Russian invasion, with the war then interrupting the project. We then go on to talk about Robert’s poetry. Robert began writing a volume in the 1970s called seaport, which was published in unfinished form in 1995. Robert returned to seaport during lockdown and has now written a (very long) version of the section that was originally missing. We talk about – among other things – the challenges of picking up an unfinished work decades after it was begun. Finally, we discuss another lockdown poetry project of Robert’s that is unfinished, called covodes. This series was – again – interrupted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Robert is also kind enough to give a reading of one of the works in this series. About Robert Robert has been engaged in research on Joseph Conrad since 1971. He has published four critical monographs on Conrad – Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992), Cross-Cultural Encounters in Conrad’s Malay Fiction (2000), Conrad’s Secrets (2012) and Joseph Conrad Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism (2023) – as well as a critical biography, Joseph Conrad (2020). He has co-edited a number of volumes of essays on Conrad: Conrad and Theory (1998), Conrad and Language (2016), The European Reception of Joseph Conrad (2022) and Conrad’s Cultural Legacy (2024). He is also the current editor of The Conradian. Robert has edited three Conrad texts for Penguin – Lord Jim (1986), Victory (1989) and Heart of Darkness (1995), and two Conrad texts for Wordsworth – Nostromo (2000) and the Lingard Trilogy (2016). He has been on the Editorial Board of the Cambridge Edition of Conrad’s Works since the 1980s. In addition, he has published numerous essays, articles and chapters in books on Conrad. Robert has published some 15 pamphlets of poetry since 1975 as well as five books of poetry: Assembled Fugitives: Selected Poems, 1973-1998 (2001); seaport (1995, 2008); an explanation of colours (2010); reworked disasters (2012); and covodes 1-19 (2021). The volume reworked disasters was long-listed for the Forward Prize, and selections form the covodes have been translated into Italian and published in Italy. Links of interest Robert Hampson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gavin_Hampson William Roscoe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Roscoe William Rothenstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rothenstein Charles Olsen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Olson
