Hannah Walker – författare

Two performance texts by Hannah Jane Walker and Chris ThorpeThe Oh Fuck MomentFucking up is the truest, funniest, most terrifying moment you can experience. Poet Hannah Jane Walker and theatre-maker Chris Thorpe examine the poetic guts of mistakes in a bundle of words and strip lighting. The Oh Fuck Moment is an award-winning conversation around a desk for brave souls to hold their hands up and admit they fucked up, or for people to laugh at us because we did. ‘A brilliant celebration of our mistakes and evolutionary reflexes’ Guardian I Wish I Was LonelyI Wish I Was Lonely is an interactive show about contactability asking whether the invisible waves we’re tethered to might be drowning who we are. It’s a show in which the audience commit to leaving their phones on. A show investigating what it means to participate in communication – or not. There are poems, there are stories and there is conversation. I Wish I Was Lonely sees Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe ask how much of ourselves we’ve given up to the new gods in our pockets.Hannah Jane Walker is a poet and Chris Thorpe is a theatre-maker.Together they make award-winning work that is part performance, part poetry gig and part interactive experience. Their work is based around an honest encounter between themselves, an audience and the difficult but often uplifting moments we all face in the process of living. Their shows feel like a generous, open conversation, with poetry and storytelling at their heart and space for audiences to contribute in a meaningful way.

'Our encounters with Madness' is a collection of user, carer and survivor narratives. These are grouped under five themes: On Diagnosis, Stories of Experience, Experiencing the System, On Being a Carer, and Abuse and Survival. The book will be of great benefit to students of mental health, professionals, service users and carers, and to those interested in narrative enquiry and the pedagogy of suffering. Unlike most other books in this genre, the narratives are unmediated. Written by 'experts by experience', there are no professional biomedical of psychotherapeutic commentaries, which often serve to capture and tame, or sanitise, such stories of direct experience.