Many Voices, Many Stories

This is a paid event and tickets go at 5 and 7 euros. Please register via the website.
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Stories do more than entertain us. They quietly shape our sense of whose lives matter, who gets to be brave, messy, joyful, complicated, loved, changed, or allowed to survive.

For a long time, many readers saw only a narrow range of lives reflected back at them. That is changing. Writers from all backgrounds have always existed, but more of their work is now being published and read. Queer characters, disabled characters, and characters from a wider range of ethnic, cultural and social backgrounds are increasingly appearing not as stereotypes or tokens, but as fully realised people at the centre of their own stories.

That matters. Seeing yourself represented on the page can be affirming: you exist, and your life is worth telling. Encountering someone unlike you, written with care and complexity, can expand empathy and imagination. This is not about ticking boxes, but about making room for the full range of human experience.

At the same time, representation raises important questions for writers. How do we write characters whose identities or experiences differ from our own? What does sensitive, responsible representation look like in practice? Where is the line between imaginative freedom and appropriation?

These are some of the questions we will explore with our panel on 19 October at 19:00 at Pianofabriek. Together, we will discuss why representation matters, what writers should consider when writing beyond their own lived experience, and how greater diversity can make our fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction richer and more truthful.