In her remarkable memoir, Sleeping Letters, Marie-Elsa Bragg offers a meditation on loss, healing and faith, looking back to the childhood moment when her mother took her own life. Using a mixture of prose and poetry, and written partly as a series of unsent letters to both her mother and father, Sleeping Letters is a way of connecting to past family, an attempt to reconcile with loss, as well as a radical exploration of Marie-Elsa’s own faith. Edmund de Waal describes the book as ‘beautiful’ and ‘a remarkable, cadenced recollection of how grief lives in the body. It is poetry as a kind of dance.’

Marie-Elsa will read from her book and be in conversation with poet and writer, Claire Williamson. Claire has also experienced bereavement through suicide and is researching the ‘grief novel’. They will explore how writing can sustain us after loss and what it means to create art from personal experience. There will be opportunities for questions.

Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg is half French, half Cumbrian and was brought up in London. Her novel ‘Towards Mellbreak’ was published by Chatto & Windus in 2017 and ‘Sleeping Letters’ in 2018. She writes for Radio 4, Church Times, Tablet and other papers. She is a Priest in the diocese of London and a Duty Chaplain of Westminster Abbey. https://marie-elsabragg.com/

Claire Williamson is a prize-winning author and former Director of Studies in therapeutic writing at Metanoia Institute. Her most recent collection is ‘Visiting the Minotaur’ from Seren in 2018. She is working on a doctorate on writing the grief novel at Cardiff University. http://www.clairewilliamson.co.uk/