I am delighted to be associated with the research centre ‘Representations of Home in Literatures and Cultures in English’ at the University of Lisbon. Colleagues have accepted my proposal to undertake an extended study of profound personal interest to me; through it I am also linked to their medical humanities programme – again, a wonderfully helpful connection.

The background to my work in this field is that in 2021 my life-partner Malcolm Rigg was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Since then I have begun to think about how I might be able to integrate our radically changed lives into my own work. I am trying to impart some meaning to what sometimes feels an overwhelming re-alignment of our reality, both in our relationship and in the world.

I have also become more aware of the rather limited, negative and medicalised language with which Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative neurological diseases are described and communicated. I am consequently very interested in shedding more light on how ‘dementia’ – the D-word – is portrayed, and in exploring ways of extending and deepening the discourse. As a poet myself, I want to explore these issues with and through the medium of poetry, as I believe it has special affordances for an understanding of ‘dementia’, through its scrupulous and lyrical telling of transitions and borderlands, twilight zones and crossings-over… 

I have been writing papers on the work of different individual poets, including Louise Glück and Philip Gross. Other poets of interest are Sarah Day, Jane Draycott and Janet Sutherland – if you have any further suggestions for poets whom you think I should consider, please contact me at lesley574@btinternet.com. Meanwhile, I will upload the papers as and when they are ready:

SAUNDERS, L. (2025). ‘Where is the Grief-Rage? Louise Glück and the Poetics of Absence’, Anglo-Saxónica, No. 23, issue 1, art. 5, 2025, pp. 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/as.167

SAUNDERS, L. (2025). ‘The Sacred Role? Poetry and the Ethics of Commemoration’. In: Pinheiro, J. and Zarebska, Z. (Eds) Representations of Old Age and Ageing in Literary and Cultural Narratives. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. Lisbon: Edições Colibri. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4255-1279

I have also contributed a chapter to a very thought-provoking book:

SAUNDERS, L. (2025). ‘Writing into the Dark: Dementia and the Cultivation of Human(e)ness’. In: Brown, C. and Handscomb, G. (Eds) Demagogues, Populism and Misinformation: A Guide to Combating Dark Ideas. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1805921714.