Ms Patricia Debney

Patricia Debney's forthcoming book, Learning to Survive, is about familial Child Sexual Abuse; work from this memoir received a Highly Commended prize in the Bridport Memoir Awards 2022. Her most recent publication is Baby (Liquorice Fish Books, 2016), a collection revolving around parental dysfunction and fragmentation. Other publications include Gestation (Shearsman Chapbooks, 2014) and a collection of prose poems written in a beach hut, Littoral (Shearsman Books, 2013), which grapples with her young son’s diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes. Her first collection (also prose poems), How to Be a Dragonfly (Smith Doorstop Books), won the 2004 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. She has also published a novel (bluechrome, 2007) and written libretti for opera, chamber groups, and solo voices. A former Canterbury Laureate, she has over 25 years’ experience teaching creative writing across all forms and to all ages and stages of students. She is a seminar and workshop based tutor with a very broad aesthetic, one who focuses on collaborating with students, deepening and developing work, wherever it starts, and whatever its eventual form.