Unwritten Woman

Hannah Lavery’s Unwritten Woman is a bold and lavish call for us to see the woman in the stories we read and tell ourselves.From her search for the story, in her home city, Edinburgh, through her chilling re-telling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde, elevating the women in that classic tale from being written between the lines, to the woman of colour, shouting from the sidelines of our cultural landscape.

Reviews of Unwritten Woman

'Delicate and furious, Unwritten Woman is an instant feminist classic, and a collection that should be on every young woman?s bookshelf, and beyond. It announces Lavery as a thinker of width, nuance, and challenge, asking the questions that might help us answer to ourselves. Outstanding' — Joelle Taylor 'This collection comes at you like a lantern from the shadows. With a creak of the floorboards and wash of delight, Hannah Lavery has brought something gothic and gorgeous to life in these pages'  — William Letford 'Like the best of hard drinks, it lingers by the chesty bits with serious intent then makes its move on the heart's soft chambers. Never without its theatre, never without its thrum, through the tenderness it thrashes' — Micheal Pedersen 'These essential poems perfectly capture the ?dreadful shipwreck? of not being easily categorised as one thing or another in a world that already resists writing you into its histories. Hannah's words reveal the enormous strength required to heal that fracture' — Marjorie Lotfi 'Unwritten Woman is an exquisite collection that highlights Hannah Lavery?s masterful skills with narrative and form. Lavery's skilful hand as a playwright adds thrilling dimension to these poems, and she crafts scenes that are imbued with a stunning poetics' — Alycia Pirmohamed 'Lavery's poems lift the woman from the margins. Often dark, sometimes hilarious, occasionally brutal, Unwritten Woman is a vital look at our culture through the lens of the other' — Jim Monaghan 'Part a love letter to her lost father; part homage to the silent women in Stevenson?s Jekyll and Hyde,  Hannah Lavery?s Unwritten Woman is a great broth of a book. A nod to Ntozake Shange with the haar coming in from the sea, Lavery takes us on a new uncharted journey. Tender and fierce. Her?s is a voice to reckon with!' — Jackie Kay 'This book is a wonder; like sitting in a roomful of flickering midnight candles gazing into the most vivid of flames; utterly illuminating. Extraordinary!' — Hollie McNish 'Unwritten Woman is an extraordinary collection; absences revealed through erasure and attention to what is truly there. These poems are worthy of their source material. Read them' — Louise Welsh  'a historically, thematically, and stylistically rich new collection' * The Bookseller *