Festivals – Dementia Fiction

Save the Date – Dementia Fiction Festival

We want to flag diary dates for our upcoming two-day festival/conference exploring dementia and fiction. It will take place at Accidental Theatre, Shaftesbury Square, Belfast on Wednesday 15th and Thursday 16th September 2021.

The festival will be hosted by the project team and will include keynotes, panels, workshops and readings. Writers, academics, people living with dementia and umbrella organisations will all be coming together for this important conversation, and the organisers hope many of you will join them too, either in person or online. Unfortunately due to Covid restrictions, there’ll be limited availability for in person places at the festival but all the sessions will be accessible online.

Further information and booking details to come. For now, please save the date. You can find out more about the Dementia Fiction project by following on Twitter @FictionDementia or visiting the project website https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/dementiafiction/ If you have any questions at this stage, please contact Jan Carson (jan.carson@qub.ac.uk)

Dementia: Feel It Through Fiction at Imagine Belfast

Free online talk as part of the Imagine Festival

27th march: 1.00pm

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Has reading fiction ever made you laugh, cry, or feel something? How can words on a page create characters and represent fictional experiences to such an extent that we not only believe, but are moved by them?

A recent ‘boom’ in fiction representing dementia has inspired QUB researchers to investigate how the language is used gives an insight into the experience of people living with dementia. This interactive talk explores how dementia is represented in fictional language, how readers respond to it, and why.

The speaker is Dr Jane Lugea (Senior Lecturer of English Language at Queen’s University Belfast), who specialises in Stylistics, the language of literature. Dr Lugea is Principal Investigator on an ongoing AHRC-funded project, ‘Dementia in the minds of characters and readers’, which investigates how dementia is represented in literary language and how it offers a window into understanding the condition. The project benefits from the expertise of Co-Investigators Dr Gemma Carney (Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at QUB) and Dr Paula Devine (Co-Director of ARK Ageing Programme), as well as Dr Carolina Fernández Quintanilla. Writer and older people arts facilitator, Jan Carson, is curating a great range of outreach activities around the project’s themes: dementia, creative writing and reading, and understanding each other better through the power of narrative.