DeathWrites Network (2022-2024)  

This Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded network is called COVID as Catalyst for Writing and Discussing Death, Dying and Grief through Objects, Diaries and Collective Archives. 

The network is developing and supporting 30 Scotland-based writers from across disciplines and genres to write and publish powerful, accessible work.

DeathWrites started at the University of Glasgow in 2017 with a series of reading and writing workshops. Since then, the team have held a number of public symposia to act as catalyst to writing on dying, death and grief.

The network is supported by RSE, The University of Glasgow Arts Lab and the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group.

The pandemic has made mortality and inequalities around mental and physical health, death, and dying more visible. We will use this as an opportune moment from which to create writing that will reflect not just on the effects of the pandemic but also facilitate better understandings of illness, dying and bereavement in the variety of complex contexts that we find ourselves in.

A primary goal of the DeathWrites Network Project is to diversify explorations of dying, death and grief and to be accessible to and representative of a wide range of voices and experiences. We aim to decentre whiteness and decolonise our creative and critical outputs to foster values of equity, diversity, and intersectional inclusivity in our call for participants and in the way we run our project.

The work produced from the two-year project will serve as resources for other individuals, communities and writers to expand thinking, understandings and activism around death, dying and bereavement.