51. Kate Kennedy: the biographer on how playing injury can lead to eating disorders

Things Musicians Don't Talk About

***This episode deals covers topics including eating disorders, mental illness and the Holocaust. Kate talks about them incredibly respectfully and not in graphic details, but for listeners that would rather sit this one out, we understand***

It's our last episode of 2022 and this time, we're speaking to the exceptional Dr. Kate Kennedy, broadcaster, academic, cellist and writer, who specialises in combining biography, words and music. She is also the Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing and a research fellow at the University of Oxford.

We talk to her from the crypt of St. Clement Danes (with somebody's wedding going on above our heads), discussing her own experiences in life and in music, and about her current work on her book, Cello, an autobiography of the instrument itself and its musicians. We were particularly interested in her biography of war poet and musician, Ivor Gurney, speaking about his own struggles with mental illness and confinement to an asylum in later life. (Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney, Princeton Press, 2021)

We're incredibly grateful to Kate for her eloquence and candidness about her own encounters with injury and struggles during her teenage years and early adulthood. It truly is a pleasure to listen to her, and interviewing her was such an enriching experience, and we cannot wait to read her future works.

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Kate's website

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It's over and out from us for the year, and wishing you all an incredibly soul-warming holiday and New Year!

Love Becca, Katy and Hattie xx

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