Louise Kenward

Louise Kenward is a writer, psychologist, and artist living in East Sussex with post-viral illness. She is currently a PhD candidate with the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her thesis is investigating the south coast of the Romney Marshes. As one of the most at risk areas in the UK for flooding, this stretch of shore takes Louise on 12 beach walks from Pett in East Sussex to Hythe in Kent, making monthly trips to beachcomb. Objects collected and observations made inform her writing practice, holding a lens of environmental and disability justice. This practice-based thesis is informed by the flotsam and jetsam that washes up, connecting place with person in the wider context of rising sea levels and post-viral illness.

She edited a first of its kind anthology, published in 2023 by Footnote, Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness and Disability. Moving Mountains includes work by writers Kerri Andrews, Polly Atkin, Sally Huband, Khairani Barokka, Eli Clare, Kate Davis, Hannah Hodgson, Louisa Adjoa Parker and Alec Finlay. It is a collection of 26 poems, essays, and prose exploring the small to the vast and is due out in paperback on 6th March 2025.

Louise was selected in the top 10 for Media and Publishing, in the 2023/2024 Disability Power 100. She is currently working on her first full length manuscript, A Trail of Breadcrumbs: a personal history of convalescence, a journey around the world accompanied by nineteenth century women travellers.