A few years back, I found myself standing in one of Exeter’s oldest buildings – St Nicholas Priory. I was on a field trip with students from the MA in magic and occult science and we were asked to pay attention to the “taper burns” on the walls. These, we were told, are what remains when the flames from a candlewick, or “taper”, have repeatedly scorched wooden timbers or exposed beams.

Dating back to the medieval period, these often flame-like shapes are a form of what is commonly known as “witch-marks”, deliberately created in order to ward off negative energy or bad omens, to bring light into dark areas, and, most tangibly, to protect the building against catching fire. Now, the uncanny pinprick of that memory returns to me with such force that I can barely think of anything else.

Most will know by now that the University of Exeter, a “world-leading” Russell Group institution and my affiliate academic home of many years now, has recently announced a proposal to cut more than 150 staff roles, with well over 500 members of staff at risk of compulsory redundancy. The cuts are largely concentrated within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, including my own department of English and creative writing, as well as the departments of film, languages, archaeology and history and the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies – co-host of the MA in magic and occult science.

Academia is my home, and I have watched it catch fire many times before. But this recent, profound threat to the very culture and foundations of a place whose walls I have been able to rest within, even as I go on as a precariously employed academic with no permanent position, is a reality I cannot face.

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Without the arts and humanities, we are left without the tools to transform and think beyond the systems which entrap us. They are a vital lifeline out of the capitalist logic which suffocates imagination and empathy because, after all, the humanities recognise and nurture human connection as well as self-knowledge; they sharpen our ability to comprehend the socio-historic contexts which indelibly shape our cultural landscape.

This is the same for everyone, but it is especially true for someone like me, the daughter of post-colonial immigrants without formal qualifications, who grew up in a working-class, deprived part of outer west London (Hayes and Harlington, to be precise). The humanities also offer a route into the sort of professional life that someone like me would have otherwise been cut off from. That is why I tenaciously pursued academia and an arts education: that and because I was – and still am – genuinely inspired by the arts.

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Yet it was not until I was studying for my A levels that I reluctantly caught a train, with a fellow student, to the Slade School of Art at UCL. And, even then, we lolled back in our train carriage and whispered to each other, albeit half-heartedly, about being hungry and bored. We had no point of reference for the art that was on display by former student Gwen John.

Deprived of the cultural means through which to understand any of the subject matter, I was nevertheless fascinated by as the two of them walk along the shore in (1896-97). And I objected to her affected placement of a chair in (1907-09). The images settled and glimmered inside my body, making odd shapes and whispering in gentle harmonies while the weird and glitchy post-colonial voices inside me nodded and simultaneously criticised John’s use of texture and her choice of medium (oils).

At the time of writing this article, more than 28,000 signatories have added their names to a , condemning cuts, and the press coverage has been growing steadily as the horrifying scale and scope of the redundancies is laid bare. But I’m adding my own narrative because it’s not one I have read very often.

In fact, I want to further state that I am a single mother and, for eight years now, I have lived in rural Devon, a short bus ride from the lowest end of the slope of “Cardiac Hill”, the infamously steep and winding road that leads up to the University of Exeter’s Streatham Campus.

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The impact of the cuts will no doubt affect my future, but most of all it will affect my friends and colleagues, whose humanity and community have enabled me to thrive as a writer and academic based in this often-flooded, old and ruined Devon. I started my career as a writer out here and have since written two books.

I know that no amount of wood charring will protect us from what is to come. But all I see now are those taper burns. They represent the very shape of things. But these are the words: Save the humanities. Save the arts. Save us from disintegration and collapse.

is a research fellow in the department of English and creative writing at the University of Exeter. She is the author of (September, 2026) and (Little Toller, 2022).