Breakthrough Class of 2023
21 under-represented writers were supported by our Breakthrough Writers' Programme in 2023, find out more about them and their works-in-progress below.
Mentoring Students
Lou Harvey
Lou was awarded a place on our Breakthrough Mentoring Programme for Disabled Writers.
Bio
Lou Harvey writes adult fiction and creative non-fiction alongside an academic career in Education. Both her academic and her creative writing are about what happens when we’re unable to articulate traumatic experience, how we make sense of things beyond our understanding, and the transformative power of accepting that we are always mysterious to ourselves. She has published widely as an academic and collaborated with theatre company Cap-a-Pie to co-devise and co-script a performance based on her research, which was funded by Arts Council England. She is being mentored on her second novel, the first fiction she’s felt brave enough to try and publish.
After reading and writing, Lou loves early choral music, walking, quizzes, maps, interstices, highly saturated colours, and aesthetic irresolution. She is a practising neuroqueer, a thwarted foodie, and a cheerful iconoclast with the eyeshadow of a much younger woman. She is at her best in the sea.
Lou's book
And I Shall Take Him is a dark literary thriller with a supernatural twist. Edinburgh student Issy Godall is looking for love after a traumatic relationship, but every man she dates reveals himself to be toxic. After she meets a mysterious woman calling herself Issy’s protector, her former dates start to disappear without trace, to Issy’s increasing horror. When Issy meets and falls in love with Jonas she believes herself to be happy, but the ongoing disappearances threaten to derail their relationship and, ultimately, endanger Issy’s life. Issy must therefore come to terms with the abuse she’s suffered and make sense of her own vulnerability. Only then can she understand who her strange protector is, discover the fate of the missing men, and break her cycle of abusive relationships.
- 'Autism and authorship have a complex relationship. Autistic people are considered either too impaired to be credible narrators, or too ‘normal’ to be credible autistic people. Autistic people, particularly women and girls, are being increasingly recognised and diagnosed, and although there are plenty of autistically coded women in fiction across the centuries, adult contemporary fiction is so far lacking in nuanced, autist-authored representations of autistic women’s lives. Autistic women are everywhere, and autistic women are nowhere. This is why my place on the Breakthrough Mentoring programme is so valuable: it will support me, as an autist author, to speak audibly to a world heavily invested in what is neurologically ‘normal’. This in turn will help to bring autistic and neurodivergent voices further into the mainstream in their full humanity, and support others to connect with their own neuroqueerness through the life-changing potential of fiction.'