News
A Little Unsteadily Into Light, an anthology of 14 new short stories exploring personal experiences of dementia, will be published this September by New Island Books.
Commissioned by Jan Carson and Jane Lugea, some of the best contemporary writers from Ireland and the UK powerfully and poignantly explore the depths and breadth of the real dementia experience, traversing age, ethnicity, class and gender, sex and consent. Each writer’s story is drawn from their own personal experience of dementia and told with outrageous and dark humour, empathy and startling insight.
These short stories disrupt the perceived notions of what dementia is and, in their diversity, honesty and authenticity begin to normalise an illness that affects so many and break down the stigma endured by those living with it every day.
This anthology has emerged from an AHRC-funded research project based at Queen’s University Belfast which investigates how the language of contemporary fiction represents the minds of characters with dementia.
The anthology features new fiction by Suad Aldarra, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Jan Carson, Elaine Feeney, Oona Frawley, Sinéad Gleeson, Anna Jean Hughes, Caleb Klaces, Naomi Krüger, Henrietta McKervey, Paul McVeigh, Mary Morrissy, Nuala O’Connor, Chris Wright.
Pre-order your copy here: https://www.newisland.ie/fiction/a-little-unsteadily
About the Editors
JAN CARSON is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. She is the author of three novels including The Raptures (2022), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. She published a short-story collection, Children’s Children, in 2016, followed by two micro fiction anthologies, Postcard Stories (2017) and Postcard Stories 2 (2020). Her second novel, The Fire Starters (2019), won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Novel of the Year Award.
Dr JANE LUGEA is Senior Lecturer in English Language in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research explores the language of literature and other creative texts, from movies to memes. She is author of World-building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives (2015) and co-author of the forthcoming textbook Stylistics: Text, Cognition and Corpora.
