Symposium on "Reading and Writing the Life Course: Ageing, Grief and Generational Connection across Europe"

Restorying Ageing: Some Insights from a Creative Life Writing Project in Ireland

Dr Michaela Schrage-Frueh (University of Limerick)

The Restorying Ageing project (2022-2024) aimed to amplify the voices of older Irish women and illuminate their diverse subjective experiences of ageing. By engaging women in “restorying” and rewriting cultural narratives around ageing, we furthermore sought to unveil the disconnect between older women’s lived realities and how ageing is portrayed in culture. A driving goal was to counteract ageist attitudes and language that pervade media and institutional discourses, which can negatively impact how older adults view themselves and their capabilities. This talk will focus on the creative anthology Well, You Don’t Look It! Women Writers in Ireland Reflect on Ageing, ed. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Michaela Schrage-Früh (Salmon, 2024) and highlight some of the themes the contributors chose to address. 

Reading Clubs at the Public Library in Lleida: Reflecting and Promoting Intergenerational Relations

 Dr Maricel Oró Piqueras (University of Lleida)

In an increasing individualistic society led by social media and technology, the promotion of intergenerational relations seems key to move and work for a sustainable society. Within project PRO-SUEDAD, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, two reading clubs were organised in the Public Library in Lleida in 2024 and 2025 that focused on contemporary novels with intergenerational relations at their core. In this presentation, I will explain the way in which these two reading clubs were organised and worked, as well as key topics that were discussed during the sessions. In my presentation, a combination of key quotes from the novels with responses from the readers will be shown as examples of to what extent fiction is a valuable source to trigger discussion.

The Elusiveness of Grief

Professor Bill Niven (Emeritus Professor, Nottingham Trent University)

Grief is something we all have experienced, or will, in our lifetimes. Yet it is very hard to define. Etymological dictionaries tell us much about the roots of the various words for grief in European languages, with the idea of being burdened, weighed down or broken a common derivation. What they don’t tell us is what that means – how are we burdened, broken? And if we are, can we be unburdened, mended? Should we want to be? It is also not clear when grief sets in. My experience in caring for someone who was chronically ill is that it sets in long before death, and that the after-death grief is not the same as the before-death grief. Nor should we think the after-death grief is instant. For many of us, it comes after a delay, and there may be those who never grieve, not because they did not love, but perhaps because they loved too much. But again, it may be a problem of definition. What if we are not broken or bent, but raging, and blind in our fury? What if we sink into a mire of self-condemnation? What if we, by contrast, passionately assign blame? What if we just go on with our lives as if nothing happened, and the world mutters we are cold-hearted? Is none of this grief? Is it a refusal to grieve, an inability? In the diary I kept in the years before and after my wife’s death, and which was subsequently published, I reflected on some of these questions. In my talk, I consider how life-writing and literature generally helps us to frame them, yet perhaps also to elude them.

Maricel Oró-Piqueras is Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Universitat de Lleida. She has been working on the representation of ageing and old age in contemporary literature, film and TV series since 2002. She is currently the IP of research group Dedal-Lit-CELCA. She is co-editor of Serializing Age: Ageing and Old Age in TV Series (2016) with Wohlmann, Re-Discovering Age(ing): Narratives of Mentorship (2019) with Casado-Gual and Domínguez-Rué and Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction (2023) with Falcus. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6868-9113

Bill Niven is Emeritus Professor for Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University. He is author of Facing the Nazi Past (Routledge 2001), The Buchenwald Child (Camden House, 2009) and Jud Süß: das lange Leben eines Propagandafilms (Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2022). In collaboration with Dr. Amy Williams, Bill has been researching the Kindertransport. Their joint book Memory of the Kindertransport in National and Transnational Perspective appeared in 2023 (Camden House). In 2024, Bill published a book reflecting on his wife’s long illness and death Du bleibst da: ein Abschied (Mitteldeutscher Verlag).

Please  register for the event.