Exploring the potential for storytelling as a creative practice for health and well-being, Michael Wilson considers how the art form might help us reconsider the power relationships in healthcare contexts and restore agency to patients, in partnership with medical professionals.

Storytelling is explored not simply as a means of conveying information and experience from one person to another but as an act of listening, a process for thinking, evaluating and understanding. Wilson reflects on his over thirty of years of researching and practising storytelling, and blends his experience with a collection of case studies representing diverse approaches to storytelling for health, including theatre, stand-up comedy, writing, visual arts and digital storytelling. Most importantly, storytelling is approached not from the point of view of the medical practitioner or educator, or even the patient, but through the lens of those who tell stories as a creative and everyday practice. It is a book with the storyteller at its core.

Michael Wilson is Professor of Drama and Head of Creative Arts at Loughborough University, where he leads the Storytelling Academy, a research and teaching team in Applied Storytelling. His main research interests lie broadly within the field of popular and vernacular performance and over the past fifteen years he has led numerous research projects across the world that explore the application of storytelling to a variety of social and policy contexts, especially around environmental policy, health, education and social justice.