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 is not a biography*, Laura Haynes

A Tale vs a Life, Kate Briggs

Quinton, Kat Chimonides

Machine Body Swamp, Kate Power

A Broken Mirror, Esther Draycott

Near and Deep as the Thunder Crashed, Laurence Figgis

Stereoscope, Kate Timney

Geology, Alice Hill-Woods

Here in a Glasgow Tenement – not asleep, not awake either-, Michael Pedersen

Of Fuck Up, Michael Pedersen 

They Thin, Nicky Coutts

Lone Spoke Lashes, Sara O’Brien

Unwilling Companion, Laura Haynes

In this Other Tongue, María Garay Arriba

Cutting Strings, Sarah Long

Top 10 Films, Stephen Sutcliffe

A Rally to You, Athene Greig 

You Cooled My Heart That Burned With Longing, Emma Aars

(Re)membering, Rebecca Fortnum

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