Acclaimed authors Marianne Brooker and Pragya Agarwal come together to discuss the intersecting issues around care-work and creativity, gender and the social and medical structures that influence all three.

Bringing these two brilliant, unique voices together, The Art of Caring, will be chaired by writer Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou. They will discuss how both author’s work frames the gendering of care-work and the cultural myths and medical biases that impact the lives and bodies of those who need it.

Looking at the creativity – theories, philosophies, art and literature – represented in the works as well as in the highly creative ways in which both books are written, The Art of Caring, will consider how Agarwal and Brooker advance new ideas on practises of care and medicine, health and wellbeing.

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Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024, Marianne Brooker’s Intervals (Fitzcarraldo Editions) beautifully weaves memoir, polemic and feminist philosophy to celebrate and chart the last weeks of her mother’s life. Diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis in 2009, Brooker’s mother sought to ‘make a workshop of herself’, engaging in activism and harnessing her own unbounded creativity to improve her own life and the lives of those around her.

Selected as a Waterstones Best Book of 2022, a Telegraph Big Ideas Book as well as an iNews Best Non-fiction Book of the same year, Professor Pragya Agarwal’s Hysterical (Canongate) delves into cultural and scientific history in order to confront and challenge widely-held notions about innate differences between male and female experiences of emotion. Building on her ground-breaking and ambitious former work, (M)otherhood (Canongate), Agarwal explores the bodily and socio-political consequences for both men and women when it comes to the gendering of human emotions, and persuasively debunks the myths surrounding them.