Public Symposium

Friday 7th June 2024, 6pm - 9pm           
Adelaide Place, Glasgow G2 4HZ

Our public symposium featured an evening of events celebrating the work of the DeathWrites Network writers. The evening at Adelaide Place, and streamed online, was filled with thought-provoking discussions and engaging readings of writing about dying, death, grief and loss. 

We invited our writers to share their thoughts on the Network and to recommend resources for those interested in the themes. Read their contributions here.

Symposium Programme



18.00 - 19.30: Invited speaker panel, chaired by Dr Elizabeth Reeder

AYANNA LLOYD BANWO (b. 1980) is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago currently living in London. Her debut novel When We Were Birds was the 2023 winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, and the American Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize, the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award, the McKitterick Prize and named one of the UK Observer’s Best Debuts and The Economist’s Best Books of 2022. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe and PREE, among others and shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She is the 2023 winner of the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award and is currently at work on her second novel.

ANDRÉS N. ORDORICA is queer Latinx writer based in Edinburgh who creates characters who are from neither here nor there (ni de aquí, ni de allá). He is the author of the poetry collection, At Least This I Know, and the novel, How We Named The Stars.

MARJORIE LOTFI is the author of The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), a winner of the inaugural James Berry Prize and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her poetry has been published widely, most recently on London’s Poems on the Underground. She’s currently working on It’s Time, a memoir about her childhood in revolutionary Iran and Ohio.

19.30 - 21.00: Readings and performances by DeathWrites Network members, chaired by Carrie Foulkes and Niamh Gordon 

We were also excited to share our first collective publication, a DeathWrites Newspaper. Free copies were available to take away.

Entry was free but ticketed. 



Venue access information

Adelaide Place has an accessible entrance on Bath Street, with a ramp into the main auditorium. There is an accessible bathroom with baby changing available to the rear of the auditorium. There is soft sofa and armchair seating in the main auditorium as well as plastic chairs. There is a quiet room available up a short flight of stairs, which has lower lighting, and a sofa and armchair seating. Captions will be enabled for the digital livestream. If you have other access requirements or would like to discuss any specifics, please email arts-deathwrites@glasgow.ac.uk