Join us for a Q&A with Haarlem based author Carmel Doohan.

Carmel has written on arts and culture for a variety of publications and her debut novel, Seesaw, was published in 2021.

When life gets hard, what will you do to the Other to protect yourself?

Boats are sinking in the Mediterranean, and Siobhan begins work at a night shelter for asylum seekers. At the same time she is coping with the fallout of her relationships with an identical twin sister, an ex-girlfriend, and a boyfriend with whom she can no longer have sex. As political conflicts escalate she begins to recognise the destructive, zero-sum dynamic she learned in childhood and is forced to acknowledge her own violent logic of self-preservation. Drawing on cinematic montage, the narrative renders fragments of memory, experience and observation in a pattern of shifting analogies that work to illuminate the possibility of a less binary world.

She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and has taught English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh.