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What are the emotional risks of using your life in your art?

What is it like for writers and performers to explore their own personal backgrounds and issues and then to go public with their revelations and confessions, and how much has that changed in recent years? Louise Allen addresses the challenge of putting her experiences of an abusive childhood in foster care onto the page in her memoir Thrown Away Child, and stand-up Ahir Shah discusses drawing on his own personal mental health issues in his stage act.
Part of Front Row’s Risk season investigating personal, financial, reputational and physical risk in all the arts.
Photo:Louise Allen with her painting Birth Mother in Ocelot.
Photo credit: Lloyd Allen

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10 minutes

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