Intro
David Copeland is a writer and editor from Johannesburg, South Africa.
His poetry has regularly appeared in New Contrast and Stanzas. His debut collection, A World Apart, was published in 2023. As an editor, he has gained considerable experience working on various projects in the literary, academic, and non-profit spheres.
David holds an MA in English Literature from Rhodes University and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Writing
David’s first collection of poetry, A World Apart, gathers poems published between 2017 and 2021 as well as many unpublished poems.
Incisive, ironic, reverent, poised, A World Apart reckons with a harsh postcolonial dispensation and weathers the ecstasies and anguish of unpropitious love. As it moves through landscapes both hostile and holy, and confronts a society marred by injustice and decay, the volume traces the contours of alienation while wrestling with the ambivalence of personal and political limbos. In this searching debut, passionate vision joins with clarity of form to yield a pensive portrait of a country and a mind.
“David Copeland brings his fine, controlling intelligence to bear on a charting of the breakdown of order.” ~ Basil du Toit
“Redemptive beauty” ~ Daniel Browde
Editing
David offers a full suite of editing services, from proofreading and copy editing to structural and developmental editing.
David has over seven years of experience as a freelance and full-time editor. His editing work has embraced a variety of content, from exhibition catalogues to project reports to funding appeals to spiritual guidebooks. Examples of larger projects include a treatise in economics, Enhancing the Credibility of Resolution (Nomos, 2022), and the memoir of an exiled anti-apartheid activist, The Way Home (UJ Press, 2024).
David has edited work for university presses, national scientific research institutions, cultural institutes, and NGOs, as well as individual writers from as far afield as Germany and China. David has been described as an editor who works “with care and seriousness.”
If you are looking for an editor for your project, please get in touch.
Scholarship
David’s research interests lie mainly in Romantic and Modernist poetry, twentieth-century British and American poetry, and certain novelists and philosophers. His doctoral thesis investigates the turn to autobiography and its concomitant crisis of style in the poets Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, and Geoffrey Hill. His Master’s thesis was concerned with the influence of the Romantic Symbol on ideas of poetic form in Modernist poetry and the New Criticism.
Writer | Editor
David Copeland 