Guest Speaker: Sue Wootton 

By Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature | Posted:

Creative Cities Southern Hui warmly welcomes SUE WOOTTON as guest speaker. Sue will be speaking at Centre for the Book: Books and Users on Wednesday 29th November. 

“Being at the Southern Hui will be like being inside an Idea Generator. What bliss!”

Sue Wootton is a poet, novelist and former physiotherapist with a longstanding interest in the intersection of health and creativity.

Sue is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Otago. Her thesis, which has the working title Life Sentences, explores the ways that literary prose illuminates aspects of illness that are otherwise difficult to recognise or express.

Sue is the selecting editor for the Otago Daily Times Weekend Poem column, and co-editor of the multi-disciplinary health humanities blog Corpus: Conversations about Medicine and Life.

Her most recent publications are her debut novel Strip (Mākaro Press, 2016), which was longlisted for the fiction prize in the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and her fifth poetry collection The Yield (OUP, 2017).

The title of Sue’s presentation is 'Bibliotherapy: books as medicine.' 

‘My talk discusses the unique strengths of fiction in ‘treating’ some of the most difficult deficits and losses that accompany illness.’

Find out more about Sue on her website: suewootton.com

The University of Otago's Centre for the Book: Books and Users symposium, on Wednesday 29th November, explores the many ways we interact with the ubiquitous object we call the book, and probes the meaning of 'user'.