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Daniela Nicolaescu is a researcher, writer and co-founder of the KERNING poetry club. She writes in English, French, and Romanian, and has published in France, Romania, the UK, the USA, and Spain.
Her research is practice-led and focuses on how new forms of art can imagine better futures through immersive experiences and text, images and sounds. She addresses important topics of our century related to displacement, climate change, and political upheavals.
Her PhD thesis challenged the interpretation of the avant-garde as nihilistic. She argued that the ultimate aim of the avant-garde was to imagine utopias. This utopian dimension was revealed through a close analysis of original archival material she discovered at Centre Pompidou and other libraries in France.
Her thesis 'The Avant-Garde Utopias of Tzara, Isou and Luca: Language, Politics, and Multimodality' was funded by the highly competitive WRoCAH training programme.
Her bilingual collection, Hyperboréen (2024, Éditions Spinelle), follows a modern-day Alice, an avatar of the author, over a decade spent in Romania, Italy, France, and England.
This is a very satisfying book, that delights both the imagination and the eye.
Ian Pople
Nicolaescu's poetry is fraught with the struggle to come to terms with the modern human condition, straddling what is real and surreal. It seeks to find comfort in nature and other people in a world at odds against pain and ill-health. And against those odds, she succeeds. A poignant debut.
Ross Heard
There is an exquisite sensitivity and irony in these verse.
Mario Martín Gijón.
Nicolaescu's collection Hyperboréen took me on a captivating disquiet journey through the visceral and dreamy, and an introspective look into identity (...). The poems are also very much contemporary, reflecting and speaking of our age.
Gertrude Gibbons
Buy Hyperboréen from Editions Spinelle or Amazon.fr
28 June 2025. I performed my poems about eels and fairyflies at Lamb & Flag, surrounded by a wonderful community of passionate poets.
23 June 2025, I passed my viva at the University of Leeds with no corrections, and I am now Dr! I feel incredibly proud, grateful, energised, and hopeful. I am proud of the work I've done on avant-garde utopias and deeply grateful to my supervisors Gigliola Sulis and Diana Holmes their support and guidance!
1 April 2026, My article, Utopia and the Pleasure of Deviation in Isidore Isou’s 'Journaux des dieux', is now published in French Studies Bulletin, Volume 47, Number 2-3.
November 2025. I performed my poetry and sold my books at Oxford Indie Book Fair.
30 April 2025, I will present a paper on 'The Utopian Visions of Tristan Tzara, Isidore Isou and Gherasim Luca' at the Centre for World Literatures, University of Leeds.
25 January 2025, Together with Blaise Sales, I will run a workshop on poetic collages exploring tongues (furry and otherwise), language, and surrealist transformations, as part of Henry Moore’s centenary exhibition, 'The Traumatic Surreal'. This 3-hour workshop is designed for individuals aged 12 to 20.
Tongueomania: Languages, Animals and Surrealist Anatomies
10 December 2024, Join us for the launch of 'The Other Side of Hope' Magazine, where I’ll be reading my poems alongside Blaise and Jonny from our poetry group, KERNING.
7 September 2024, Hyde Park Book Club, Book launch of Hyperboréen collection of English and French poems. REGISTER HERE.
20 August 2024 Other People's Poems, I will be performing a poem from my book Hyperboréen at the 'Other People's Poetry' event, along with some other poems that have inspired me.
1-3 July 2024 I presented a paper titled: 'Spectral Spaces of Holocaust and Hauntings in Serge Moscovici in Mon après-guerre à Paris and Isidore Isou in L’Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie', at the 65th Annual Conference, University of Stirling.
31 May 2024 I presented a paper on 'Resistance and deviations in Journaux des dieux (1950) by Isidore Isou, at King's College London.
20 August 2024 I will be performing a poem from my book Hyperboréen at the 'Other People's Poetry' event, along with some other poems that have inspired me.
07 February 2024 Poetry reading of the poem 'Weeping archives' at More Song at the Record Cafe, hosted by Tom Branfoot.
Throughout 2024 running KERNING poetry sessions at the University of Leeds together with Blaise Sales and Jon Gilbert.
Kerning is a University of Leeds’ postgraduate poetry writing group. The group embraces all poetic and associated performance practices, from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘experimental’.
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