This is not a biography*

An Anthology of Biographical Fictioning

Edited by Laura Haynes, Alice Hill-Woods & Kate Timney

The rapacious biographical fallacy takes license to speculate, invents identity, curates a mythology to mourn. Biography is a house museum. Magnetised between remembering and forgetting, biographical riddles figure sightings of self and other, willing or unwilling companions. Lyrical, mediated, mythologised, departed from real life, biographical fictioning knows subjectivity as diverse, provisional and intersubjective.

The artists and writers gathered in this collection follow from two masterclasses presented by Art Writing at The Glasgow School of Art in 2022. Each session invited participants to consider how biomythography, or biographical fiction-ing and related approaches, allow for generative, radically subjective narratives in response to ‘real’ or ‘factual’ historical and contemporary events in our own lives and the lives of others. The (auto)biographical is not absolute. It is, by necessity, provisional, unanchored and contingent.

This book was supported by The Glasgow School of Art Staff Student Partnership Awards.

ISBN 978-1-9162092-5-1

Available at Good Press