Who we are and what we do.
We are a small collective from a wide range of backgrounds that encompass everything from academics to manual labourers with a diverse set of skills – from explorers to visual artists, historians, geographers, poets, writers, photographers, designers, editors, publishers and anthologists. Waterland has bought us together in a desire to produce what are generally short runs of books that might otherwise never see the light of day.
Our projects so far, include: poetry anthologies, church guides, photo books, novels and books on landscape history and geography.
Below you can find out a little bit about some of us and what we do with our lives.
Cameron Self
Writer, photographer, editor, forklift truck driver.
Cam was born in Cambridge but moved to Norfolk with his family in 1964. He completed a BA in Geography at Hull University in 1983 and an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University in 1985. His debut collection of poetry, Gedney Drove End, was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards in 2010.
His poems have been widely published. His photographs have appeared in various publications. He is also the author of the Poets’ Graves and Literary Norfolk websites, and various books. He lives in Norwich and by day works at a local garden centre as a plantsman and forklift truck driver.
Stephen Hyatt-Cross
Photographer, artist.
Stephen is a multi-disciplinary artist working primarily with drawings, paintings and photographs. His work encompasses many things: a record of things seen; places visited; people; an avoidance of the spectacular; a preference for quiet corners and photomontage. He mostly works using digital and occasionally film.
His published works include Ghosts: A Portrait of the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads (Waterland 2023), Cloaked Figures, Collated Observations 17, published by ADM, Front Gardens (2020), Photomontage (2020), and Happisburgh (2019, with Cameron Self). Stephen’s drawings appear in our Lake District anthology.
Jeremy Noel-Tod
Jeremy Noel-Tod is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
He has reviewed poetry for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph, and was the poetry critic for The Sunday Times from 2013 to 2021. He has edited the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013), the Complete Poems (2015) of R.F. Langley, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018), Market Lunch: Poems of Norwich (2020) and Norwich Sonnets and Other Poems (2025) by local poet Ron Nevett. He writes a weekly poetry newsletter, Some Flowers Soon.
Some Flowers Soon | Bluesky | UEA
Jess Streeting
Writer, poet.
Jess combines a career in community nursing with writing and is a Queen’s Nurse.
Native to Norfolk, she has a deep love for East Anglia, drawing on local landscape and life.
In 2016, she independently published Last Summer in Soho, a narrative based on her experiences as a school nurse in Central London.
Her most critically acclaimed work is the award-winning Sea-Change, an epic poem exploring childhood loss and love, published by Propolis Books. (2021)
Jess lives on a narrow boat in London and in Cromer. She is currently writing a fantasy novel for children, inspired by life in her beloved sea-side town.
John Fielding
Photographer, pilot.
John first soloed in a glider with the cadets as a teenager in 1979. He took up powered flying in 2009 and quickly combined it with his love of photography. Since then he has posted thousands of aerial images on Twitter/X and Flickr from around the UK but concentrating on the sunny plains of East Anglia.
Most of his shots are from an aircraft but he occasionally employs a drone. John’s photographs are in print and online around the world. Locally, John’s work has appeared in Enticing Paths, a Norfolk Gardens Trust book, A History of Norfolk in 100 Places, a guide to many of Norfolk’s historic sites, and in The Lost Villages of Norfolk, published by Waterland.
Caroline McGhie
Novelist and journalist
Caroline McGhie has spent most of her life working for national newspapers and magazines, writing about property, architecture, design and lifestyle choices (all of which she prefers to think of as present-day social history). She won awards for her work in The Sunday Times, The Independent On Sunday Review and The Sunday Telegraph.
In 2015 she became seriously ill and has since spent years in recovery but has tried to turn a problem into a blessing by devoting herself to learning the craft of fiction and memoir, looking after her grandchildren and walking on the marsh. In her spare time, she loves to mend clothes for her best friends. The Sitter is her debut novel, described by D.J. Taylor as “impressively constructed and highly atmospheric…full of clamouring late-Victorian voices.”
Simon Knott
Church explorer, writer, photographer.
Simon was born in the Isle of Ely and spent time in Sheffield and Brighton before moving to Ipswich, where he has lived for forty years. He is widely recognized for chronicling the churches of East Anglia. Over the last three decades he has dedicated himself to documenting in words and photographs every parish church across Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and most of Essex too. He now spends most of his time wandering aimlessly around the country to see what he can find.
Ali Miller
Proofreader, poet, priest.
Ali has degrees in Chemistry and Pharmacology and Theology and Ministry from the universities of Liverpool and Durham respectively. Ali is also a tea guzzling, sacrament wielding, liturgy loving, contemplative – with a thing for trees, ghosts and folk horror. Also: writing and preaching, books and cinema, and walking – but only if there is a pint of real ale at the end of it. Alright, she’s a priest, poet and spiritual director.
Dr. Kevin Gardner
Editor, Academic.
Kevin has wide-ranging literary interests but is especially engaged with contemporary British poetry and the literature of the Restoration and 18th century. He is the author of a forthcoming book on Alexander Pope, and reviews poetry frequently for PN Review and Wild Court. He is the editor of John Greening’s selected poems, The Interpretation of Owls, and of Anthony Thwaite’s selected, At the Garden’s Dark Edge.
He has edited or coedited a number of anthologies, including Building Jerusalem: Elegies on Parish Churches; Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems; and Contraflow: Lines of Englishness, 1922-2022. He particularly enjoyed coediting with Cam our anthologies on Norfolk poetry and Lake District poetry.
He is the author of Betjeman and the Anglican Imagination and has edited four volumes of Betjeman’s writings: Betjeman on Faith: An Anthology of His Religious Prose; Poems in the Porch: The Radio Poems of John Betjeman; Faith and Doubt of John Betjeman: An Anthology of His Religious Verse; and Harvest Bells: New and Uncollected Poems.
Kevin is a Professor in the English department at Baylor University, where he teaches courses in Restoration and 18th-century British literature. He holds a Ph.D. from Tulane University, an M.A. from the College of William and Mary, and a B.A. from the University of St. Thomas.
Nick Stone
Visual artist, writer, tea boy.
Nick is a multi-disciplinary artist, a designer, photographer, writer and an art director – basically he takes photographs and writes about them, and sometimes writes about other people’s photographs too. He also enjoys making and collecting, including objects, things, ideas and stories. He likes the quiet chatter of our urban and rural landscapes, where human and physical geography and history show though. He is also the creator of various things, his mainstay is Invisible Works.
Instagram | Bluesky | Invisible Works | nckjstn | Design