People
Meet the people:
Dr Lesley Saunders
Lesley is an acclaimed poet and translator, an experienced educational researcher, and more recently a dementia researcher, advocate and campaigner.
Bringing her gift for poetry and classical scholarship together with her study of dementia, she has recently published an article in Anglo-Saxónica, ‘Where is the Grief-Rage? Louise Glück and the Poetics of Absence’, No. 23, issue 1, art. 5, 2025, pp. 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/as.167
as well as
‘Writing into the Dark: Dementia and the Cultivation of Human(e)ness’. In: Brown, C. and Handscomb, G. (Eds) Demagogues, Populism and Misinformation: A Guide to Combating Dark Ideas, Leeds: Emerald Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1805921714.
Her poetry collections include: The Dark Larder (Corridor Press, 1997); Christina the Astonishing, with Jane Draycott and Peter Hay (Two Rivers Press, 1998); Her Leafy Eye (Two Rivers Press, 2009), a collaboration with artist Geoff Carr; No Doves (Mulfran Press, 2010); and Cloud Camera (Two Rivers Press, 2012). The Walls Have Angels was published by Mulfran Press in 2014, and This Thing of Blood & Love in 2022.
Her poems have appeared in a wide number of publications, including the London Review of Books, Arete, PN Review, Poetry London, Spare Rib, and the Warwick Review
She was a winner in the Poetry News members’ poems competitions in 2011 and 2014. Her poem ‘The Uses of Greek’ was shortlisted for the Best Single Poem in the Forward Prize 1999; and in 2008 she was joint first in the inaugural Manchester competition for a portfolio of poems. She won the Frogmore Poetry Prize 2014.
Her individual poems have also won prizes: she took third place in the 2022 Rialto RSPB poetry competition for her poem ‘Ghosts’, and first prize in the 2022 Winchester Poetry Festival prize for her poem ‘The Starlings’.
In 2016 she won the Stephen Spender prize for literary translation, with a version of a poem by acclaimed Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta.
Professor Liz Barry
Liz is a Professor of modern literature at the University of Warwick, and teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies programme.
She has published widely in medical humanities, and age studies. Work in the area of dementia studies includes her articles 'The Phenomenology of Dementia: Time, Emotion, and Relationality in Life and Lifewriting' in Age Culture Humanities, Vol. 7 (2023): Age, Culture, Humanities (special issue: "Transitional and Relational Aging: Part 1"),
and
'Dementia, Language, and Performative Force: The Case of Laughter. Poetics Today, 44 (1-2), 37-62
and a book chapter:
'Critical interests and critical endings: Dementia, personhood and end of life in Matthew Thomas’s We are not ourselves' in Barry and Skagen (eds), Literature and ageing (Boydell, 2020), pp.120-48.
Her short talk on dementia and laughter can be found here:
Rethinking dementia: Dementia, time and laughter
Liz also edited the 2020 volume of the English Association Essays and Studies series, Literature and Ageing (Boydell and Brewer) with Professor Margery Vibe Skagen (U of Bergen), where the above chapter appears, and has written on ageing in the Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Textual Practice, Poetics Today, European Journal of English Studies, and Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd'hui, and several age studies companions and handbooks, as well as co-editing a double issue of Age Culture Humanities in 2023.
In 2018 she organized the international conference Living a Good Life in Older Age at Warwick. Talks from this event are available on YouTube here:
(2) Living a Good Life in Older Age symposium, Warwick, July 2018 - YouTube