Life-writing has long provided people living with illness a means to reflect, record, reframe, communicate, and create art. Recent medical advances mean that more people survive serious conditions or are able to manage them in the long term. At the same time, digital media has multiplied how lives and selves can be written into being. Yet social and cultural frameworks still shape the definition and meaning of illness.

This OCLW ‘Lives in Medicine’ workshop creates space for counter-narratives of illness. More broadly, it examines the entanglements between illness experiences, life writing, and prevailing cultural storylines.

The workshop brings together scholars, literary authors, and practitioners of illness life-writing to consider questions such as:

What roles do narratives play in enabling—or hindering—the articulation of different illness experiences?

Which forms of life-writing (and other modes of expression) can work as counter-narratives to mainstream scripts?

Do we need stories of cancer and other socially and medically consequential conditions that sit outside clinical frames?

What counter-narrative strategies might such stories use, and what might they reveal?

These questions place us at the porous threshold between bodies and selves, and between medical science, the humanities, and the arts.

The workshop is open to anyone interested in transdisciplinary research, life-writing, illness narratives, experience and memory, medicine, critical health humanities, narrative medicine, cancer studies, and queer, feminist, trans, and crip studies, as well as critical and creative approaches to the arts.

Workshop Outline:

1100-1200: ‘Counter-narratives of Cancer’: introduction by Hanna Maretoja and Astrid Joutseno/Swan.

1200-1300: Lunch (registered participants may purchase lunch from Wolfson dining hall).

1300-1345: Interview with author Maddie Mortimer, The Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (2022).

1345-1500: Demonstration of the Narrative Agency Reading Group Model.

1500-1530: Tea/Coffee break (refreshments provided).

1530-1700: Roundtable: ‘Illness, Narrative, and Life-Writing’ (Danielle Spencer, Emilia Nielsen, Angela Woods, and Tamarin Norwood).

NB: The demonstration includes reading and creative writing exercises. However, there is no obligation to share your writing. No preparation is required. The demonstration will be streamed but will not be recorded.

Speaker Details:

Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku. She runs the Research Council of Finland projects “Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency” (2023–27) and “Narrative Agency Reading Group Model: Applications for Libraries, Schools and Hospitals” (2025–26). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (2019–2020) and a Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford (2019–2020, spring 2023), and she is a member of Academia Europaea and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Her research primarily focuses on narrative studies and medical and health humanities. Her publications include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (2018, Oxford University Press), The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), and a novel (Elotulet, 2022; Die Nacht der alten Feuer, 2024; ‘The Night of Ancient Lights’) that deals with the experience of getting a cancer diagnosis.

Astrid Joutseno/Swan is a Researcher in the Finnish Research Council Project’ Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency’ (2023–2027), University of Turku. During 2024–2025 Joutseno is a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, University of Oxford. For 2023–2024 Joutseno was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts at Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies. Joutseno’s current research focus is on her original finding: the grief of the dying. Her interest in grief extends to cancer grief, generational and inherited grief, and artistic expressions of grief. Joutseno’s doctorate is from Gender Studies, specialising in theories and praxis of life-writing. Her PhD ‘Life Writing from Birth to Death: How M/others Know’ (2021) won the Best PhD dissertation award at the University of Helsinki. Joutseno’s article ‘Becoming D/other: Life as a Transmuting Device’ won the 2020 Hogan Prize. Astrid Swan is an award-winning songwriter and performer. She has published seven albums, one memoir and a novel. In 2018, Swan’s album From the Bed and Beyond won the Teosto award in Finland and was shortlisted for the Nordic Music Prize the same year. Since 2014, Joutseno/Swan has lived with breast cancer. This experience has informed both her research and creative practice.

Emilia Nielsen is the author of two critically noted collections of poetry, Body Work (Signature Editions, 2018) and Surge Narrows (Leaf Press, 2013). Her book Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair (University of Toronto Press, 2019) received the American Folklore Society’s Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize. She is an associate professor in the Department of Social Science at York University, Toronto, where she teaches in Health and Society and supervises graduate students in Communication and Culture, Critical Disability Studies, English, and Health Policy and Equity. Her current research explores the experiential knowledge of chronic illness, hybrid forms of life-writing, and critical-creative approaches. She hosts and executive produces the podcast On Being Ill: Conversations on Creativity, Disability and Identity.

Danielle Spencer is a faculty member in the Columbia University Narrative Medicine Graduate Program. Author of Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity (Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-author of the Perkins-Prize-winning The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (OUP, 2017), her work appears from The Lancet to Ploughshares. She is Editor of the Anthem Studies in Narrative and Health Humanities series, Associate Editor of Literature and Medicine, and has held fellowships at MacDowell and Yaddo.

Angela Woods is Professor of Medical Humanities at Durham University. She is Director of Durham’s Institute for Medical Humanities and Director of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, funded by Wellcome. Her research spans voice-hearing and psychosis; narrative and health; and the dynamics of interdisciplinary collaboration. She co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities and edits Bloomsbury’s Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities. In 2025, she was appointed Fellow of the English Association and awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Linköping University.

Tamarin Norwood is an author and academic with a background in fine art. Her literary memoir of neonatal loss, The Song of the Whole Wide World, is now used in medical and midwifery curricula in the UK and Australia, building on her Wakley Essay Prize-winning ‘Something Good Enough’ in The Lancet. She holds a Leverhulme ECR Fellowship (Loughborough, 2023) and, in 2025, became Associate Editor at Medical Humanities, Honorary Fellow at Durham’s Institute for Medical Humanities, and Affiliate Scholar at SELMA, University of Turku.

Maddie Mortimer was born in London in 1996, and studied English Literature at the University of Bristol. She has worked in marketing and as a screenwriter. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is her first novel. It won the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize for best debut novel. It has also been longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2022, and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2023. Maddie has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award 2023.

Further Details and Contacts:

This hybrid event is free and open to all. Registration is required.

The workshop will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.

Registration will close at 2200 on 13 October 2025.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.