Lou Tondeur

Dr Louise Tondeur is a part-time Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton, and an award-winning writer. She has worked for several writing organisations including New Writing South, Creative Future, Jericho Writers and Arvon.

Lou studied Drama at University of East Anglia, then trained as a Drama teacher and worked in schools and community groups, as well as directing her own theatre company, before returning to UEA to study for an MA in Creative Writing. As a result, she published two novels with Headline Review called The Water’s Edge (2003) and The Haven Home for Delinquent Girls (2004).

Lou subsequently did in PhD in English Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Reading on queer readings of hair, and she has since published peer-reviewed essays on hair, disability and creative practice, and is especially interested in the idea of weirdness or ‘reading / writing the weird.’

In terms of her own writing practice, Lou is interested in writing place and writing on location as well as queer and neurodivergent love stories. Lou recently finished her second short story collection Invisible, which will be published by Knight Errant Press in 2024. The first, Unusual Places, was published in 2018 by Cultured Llama, and was written on location in various venues, mainly in London. Interested in confessional and 'apparently personal poetry' (Sharon Olds), Lou's poetry credits include Perverse, The Rialto, Under the Radar, Shearsman, Finished Creatures, and the Telltale Press Anthology Truths. Lou is currently working on a crime novel set in Norwich and Norfolk / Suffolk border country where her grandparents lived for many years. She has recently written about her experience of researching place for the National Writers' Centre.

My research interests include writing and mindfulness, writing practice, writing about practice, disability and hair. These are connected by an abiding interest in intersectional feminism, queer theory, neurodivergence, and writing the weird, after Joanne Limburg's work on weirdness. What does it mean to read, write and think from a position of queerness, neurodivergence, disability, hairiness or of so-called strangeness or weirdness? Does the weird create a 'reading effect' (Felman 1977) or a creative '[writing] effect'? And what does the weird do to / how does it act on culture?

Over the last few years, I have trained in digital and independent publishing, and have self-published four guides to the writing process as a result, and keep a blog on my author website.

I am interested in supervising work on writing and wellbeing, writing practice, particularly writing place, writing about practice, or on hair and its cultural manifestations. I am also interested in supervising work on weirdness or reading / writing the weird. I recently examined a PhD on 'reading otherwise' and my own PhD looked at the idea of 'reading queer'.

I have been teaching in various guises for thirty years. I regard creativity, wellbeing and inclusion as central to my teaching practice. I use structured and unstructured group work, person-centred learning, mindfulness, and 'flipping' in my classes, as well some of the latest research on wellbeing and mindset. I've written about the craft of writing in a series of blog posts for New Writing South here. As a member of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing at the University of Brighton, I am enthusiastic about sharing writing and wellbeing practices with students and colleagues.

I have published on Creative Writing and Drama pedagogy in Writing in Education, Writing in Practice, TEXT, Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Creative Learning and Teaching Magazine, and National Drama Magazine, and spoken regularly about creative teaching and reflective practice at conferences. I am a Senior Fellow of the HEA and have been nominated for a National Teaching Fellowship twice.