Lizzie Pickering and Tamarin Norwood chaired by Susannah Jowitt

Bereaved parent Lizzie Pickering and writer and academic Dr Tamarin Norwood discuss their experiences of grief and the work they do to help others experiencing loss.

In When Grief Equals Love: Long-term Perspectives on Living with Loss Pickering explains how she set out on a journey to understand how she could survive and live with grief following the death of her young son Harry in Oxfordshire in 2000. She looks at the myth of closure, survivor’s energy and cumulative grief, and she offers a toolkit based on what has helped her and on what she now recommends to those she now helps with grief guidance. Pickering is a speaker, grief investigator, and film and podcast producer. Her son, Harry, had spinal muscular atrophy and died at Helen House Hospice in Oxford at the age of six.

Norwood is a writer and academic with a background in fine art. In The Song of the Whole Wide World: On Grief, Motherhood and Poetry, she writes of her experience of learning five months into pregnancy that her baby would not live. The memoir draws on stories from medical science, poetry, liturgy, vivid waking dreams of underwater life, and knowledge held deep within the body. Norwood is a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and at the University of Bath Centre for Death and Society, and a Leverhulme research fellow at Loughborough University.

Discussions are chaired by journalist Susannah Jowitt.