Laura Donald 

Laura Donald is a Wellcome Trust funded PhD researcher investigating literary representations of chronic heart conditions. Comparing fictionalised accounts to lived experience, she considers how traditional heart-disease stories can impede the expression of real-life, long-term narratives. Laura shares her own experiences of heart failure through personal writing and visual art/craft.

Having lived with a serious but stable heart condition for a decade before, quite suddenly, receiving a heart transplant, I use writing and art to explore and narrate my experiences as they unfold. The uncertainty of my health feeds into my creative practice, the outcomes of which are equally unknown. Much of my work reflects directly upon the challenges and ethics of using writing and creativity to narrate life as it happens. I question how individual stories relate to universal experiences, and whether the “facts” of real life might be more accurately represented via fictional, metaphorical, or even non-verbal telling.

← back to Network Writers