Staying On Top by Wendy French

Artform: Spoken Word

Wendy French ran a small school in a psychiatric hospital for over fifteen years where she believed in an arts-based curriculum to help young people with their problems and illnesses.

She has five full collections of poetry published and won the inaugural Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine prize for the NHS section in 2010 and was awarded second prize in 2011. She facilitates creative writing in healthcare settings. With Jane Kirwan, she wrote the book ‘Born in the NHS’. They are both passionate that the NHS should survive.

She was Poet-in-Residence at the University College Hospital Macmillan Cancer Centre in 2015. The book ‘Thinks Itself a Hawk’ arose from that residency.

She has changed direction temporarily with her writing and is exploring her ancestry. Her fifth book, ‘Bread Without butter’ has just been published, July 2020, by Rockingham Press.

‘Staying On Top’ is a beautiful tale of a young man who she worked with who could never finish anything he was doing as he thought to finish something would bring bad luck.