'Words are my health, the struggle to hear and transcribe the tune behind what I'm given by word of mouth.' (from 'A Hospital Odyssey' by Gwyneth Lewis)

 

'We are always trying to redeem our sense of being fragmented by means of the stories we recount about ourselves and each other and our world.' (from 'Hunger' by Raymond Tallis)

 

Lapidus, the UK organisation for creative writing and reading for health and wellbeing, asks big questions about poetry, health and the search for sustainable and satisfying narratives.We are delighted to welcome eminent writers and thinkers Gwyneth Lewis and Raymond Tallis, who will read from their work and discuss themes with Fiona Hamilton. 

 

Gwyneth Lewis was Wales' first National Poet in 2005-6. In 2010 she received a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award in recognition of her achievement. 'A Hospital Odyssey' is a modern epic in which a hospital becomes the setting for a journey of bodies and minds and a deep investigation of health and survival.

 

Raymond Tallis has been described in The Independent as 'one of Britain's greatest intellectual all-rounders: a philosopher, novelist, poet, former professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester and an international authority on epilepsy in older people'. He is as interested in the detail of the brain's structures and functions as in the curiousness of a kiss or the different kinds of human hunger.