Barbara Touati-Evans

I am a children’s playwright, poet and community creative writing facilitator. With fifteen years experience working in the sector, I have had multiple plays for primary school age children to perform published and have had works for children and families commissioned from theatres and arts organisations. My playwrighting focus is on inclusive history that is curriculum-adjacent or locally relevant and I’m particularly passionate about amplifying the stories of marginalised women and girls from the past. I work with schools and in the community delivering a range of bespoke workshops to young people, families and to those living with dementia and their carers.

My debut novel, The Normal State of Mind (Parthian, 2015) was long listed for the Mumbai Association of Moving Images (MAMI) Word to Screen Prize. Table Manners (Dahlia Books, 2018) won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection in 2019. My short stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4. I develop and deliver writing workshops for various art galleries and organisations around Hampshire and beyond. I teach creative writing at University of Winchester and am a trustee of The Winchester Poetry Festival. I’ve also developed ands teach a short story course for Professional Writing Academy. I’m co-founder of Write Beyond Borders, a transnational mentoring project writers from South Asia and its diaspora.    

Katt is an artist-researcher-practitioner creating strange, playful work shaped by mischief, memory and nature, where reality and fiction blur through mythology and self-reflection. She is undertaking an AHRC-funded CDP PhD at the University of Portsmouth with Portsmouth Natural History Museum, exploring how regional museums can reimagine interactions with natural history collections through participatory creative methods and research-through-design, using emerging technologies within an attunement-led approach. Influenced by poetry, folklore and speculative practice, she brings stories to life through found, stolen and fabricated artefacts, prototypes and sensory encounters, and is drawn to the unreliable narrator as a form of mischief.