Patricia Debney

Patricia Debney is a survivor of child sexual abuse, a writer, an activist and a lecturer in creative writing. Her next book, Leaving Locust Avenue, is a memoir about a writer coming of age through child sexual abuse and neglect. Her first collection of prose poems, How to Be a Dragonfly (Smith Doorstop Books, 2005), was the overall winner of the 2004 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. Subsequent collections – Littoral, Gestation, and Baby – are respectively responses to her son’s diagnosis of type 1 diabetes, and her mother’s mental illnesses and dementia. She has also published short stories and a novel. Her work has appeared in Forward Prize anthologies, The Sunday Times, Best British Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2016 and 2018, she was commissioned to write the opening poems of the Pride of Britain Awards (ITV), subsequently broadcast to millions. A Reader at the University of Kent for 20 years, she is currently a creative writing Tutor at the University of Cambridge, as well as a freelance mentor and facilitator.