Panel: Exploring Queer Mental Health in Books and Beyond

This panel – chaired by Lou Tondeur – will explore the impact that colonialism, physical disease, living in non-normative bodies, class and prejudice have on mental health. The panel, featuring Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Sanah Ahsan and Michael Handrick, will dig deep into how queer mental health is explored in their work.

They’ll ask the questions: is queer mental health taken seriously? How can exploring queer mental health in poetry and prose be both personally and politically beneficial? This enlightening and uplifting panel will engage, inform and uplift.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His books include Becoming Dickens (2011), which was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize, The Story of Alice (2015), which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces (2023). He writes regularly for publications including the Times, Spectator, and Literary Review, while radio and television appearances include Start the Week, the Today Programme, BBC Breakfast, and The Culture Show. He has acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations and Dickensian, and both of the Enola Holmes films for Netflix. He has judged the Man Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize, and in 2015 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Sanah Ahsan is an award-winning poet, writer, liberation psychologist and educator. Sanah works in the cracks, revering our messy emotional landscapes, and the wild edges of falling apart. Their psychological practice is rooted in liberation and community psychology, drawing on embodiment, therapeutics and poetics as life-affirming practices, to support racialised and marginalised people. Sanah’s work centers compassion and embracing each other’s madness; they have written for the Guardian and presented a Channel 4 documentary on the over-medicalisation of people’s distress. Sanah is working on a non-fiction book about the politics of distress, and society’s relationship with unruly emotions. Sanah’s debut poetry collection I cannot be good until You say it is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2024.

Michael Handrick is the author of Difference is Born on the Lips, part-memoir, part-exposé exploring the domestic abuse and mental health crises in the gay community. His work has been shortlisted for Penguin Random House’s WriteNow 2020 and Kit de Waal’s anthology, Common People, and longlisted for the London Writers Awards (2019). In 2013, aged 23, he was invited to present his academic thesis on gender and sexuality at an international literary conference at Magdalen College, Oxford. He has had features and articles on culture, mental health, gender and sexuality published by magazines such as Attitude, PYLOT and Openly. His fiction pieces have been published in anthologies such as Litro, and shortlisted and longlisted for various competitions including the Creative Future Literary Awards (2018, 2020).

Dr Louise Tondeur worked as Drama teacher before doing an MA in Creative Writing at The University of East Anglia. She published two novels with Headline Review called The Water’s Edge and The Haven Home for Delinquent Girls, then wrote a PhD on queer readings of hair, started a family, and became a Creative Writing lecturer. Since then, she has published several books, articles, stories and poetry. Poetry credits include Perverse, The Rialto, Under the Radar, Finished Creatures and Shearsman, and her first short story collection, Unusual Places, was published in 2018. A revised edition of her nonfiction book on goal-setting came out in the summer and she has self-published a series of short, friendly guides for writers. Her second short story collection, Invisible, is due from queer press Knight Errant in 2024. Lou currently teaches for the Open University and the University of Brighton. Having led writing workshops with many different groups, she is interested in writing and mindfulness, particularly the link between writing and mindful self-compassion, and is writing a book for Bloomsbury’s Creative Writing Studies imprint called Writing and Wellbeing. Lou lives in Hove with her wife and son and two black cats and blogs at: www.louisetondeur.co.uk/blog