About Valerie
Valerie Laws: poet, novelist, playwright, sci-art specialist, mathematician, swimmer.
Her first crime novel, The Rotting Spot, published 2009 by Red Squirrel Press, was selected as one of four Read Regional titles, to be promoted by New Writing North at events and venues across the region. Set on the Northumbrian coast, it involves secrets and skull collecting! The book won her a Northern Writer's Award, with mentoring from Lisanne Radice.
Read more about The Rotting Spot, or see NWN's photos of the Read Regional event on Flickr.
Valerie performs readings and signings all over the country.
Valerie is Writer in Residence at a London Pathology Museum, part of her cross-disciplinary Wellcome Trust Arts Award-funded project This Fatal Subject, working with scientists in London and Newcastle on the science of dying, (with artist Susan Aldworth), with special access to specimens and dissections. A London exhibition of resulting work (poetry, film, text, visual art) was a Guardian Guide Pick of the Week in February 2009. Pathology-themed poetry also won Valerie a 2nd Northern Writers' Award, and 2nd Prize in the 2008 Mslexia competition.
She is also Writer in Residence at Newcastle University's Institute of Ageing and Health. Her third residency is as Newcastle poet for Evolving Words, a national project on Darwin funded by Wellcome Trust working with young poets.
A sci-art specialist, her Arts Council-funded Quantum Sheep infamously involved spray-painting poetry onto live sheep, and her Windows of Art electroluminescent embedded haiku are installed in St Thomas Hospital, London, with more than 350 visitors per day. Her latest random haiku, on inflatable beach balls, featured on BBC2's Why Poetry Matters with Griff Rhys Jones.
She has degrees in Maths/Theoretical Physics and in English. She performs her poetry on stage and in the media, including BBC TV, radio, and at festivals and events. She lives on the North East coast and has published eight books, including two poetry collections from Peterloo Poets, Quantum Sheep and Moonbathing. She has written many commissioned plays for stage and BBC radio, including The Selkie for Cloud Nine, an updating of the seal-woman myth which toured the north in 2008 after opening at Sage Gateshead. In October 2008, BBC Radio 3 broadcast her play, Nowt to Look At, the life story of a severed head in a specimen jar.
She is currently working on play commissions for Customs House South Shields, (about John Simpson Kirkpatrick), and a surreal comedy for Graeae in London for a national tour.
E-mail Valerie: .