Lonely Children in the Mirror: Isolation, Young People’s Mental Health and Literary Chronotopes. Mizuki Tsujimura’s award-winning novel, Kagami no Kojou, was published in Japan in 2017 and translated into English as Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Philip Gabriel in 2021 (Tsujimura, 2021). The novel is a fantasy adventure which begins when the protagonist, Kokoro,…
Author: Gita Ralleigh
Gita Ralleigh is a writer, poet and doctor born to Indian immigrant parents in London. She grew up reading fantasy adventures that took her to faraway lands – the closest she came was on family holidays to India, where old palaces, ice-capped mountains, monkeys and elephants were part of everyday life. After a career as a medical doctor, she studied for an MA in Creative Writing and has published short stories, winning the Wasafiri prize for fiction in 2013, as well as two poetry books. 'The Destiny of Minou Moonshine', her debut children's novel was published in 2023 by Zephyr/Bloomsbury and 'The Voyage of Sam Singh' came out in July 2024 from the same publisher. She lives in London with her two children and teaches creative writing to undergraduates at Imperial College.
A Different Gaze
Foucault was a French philosopher known for his interrogation of knowledge and structures of power. In Birth of the Clinic (1973) he described how the medical gaze arose from 18th-century dissection, which exposed ‘what for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible’ developing further through 19th-century pathological anatomy, which reduced…
On the Lyric Essay as Illness Narrative
Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private interior yet its trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the outside. Anne Carson, The Gender of Sound (Glass, Irony and God) As a doctor who also teaches creative writing, I am aware that features of narrative such as…