Michelle A Taylor is proof that the road less travelled might just be paved with success.
The 33-year-old occupational therapist and University of Queensland graduate has just turned a decade of working with troubled youths and mentally ill patients into a groundbreaking and already much-feted novel, The Angel of Barbican High.
Launched last month by State Arts Minister The Hon Matt Foley – a coup that arose from the book’s shortlisting in the 2000 Premier’s Literary Awards – The Angel of Barbican High has also earned Taylor launch honours at this Subverse Poetry Festival, held in tandem with the Brisbane Writers Festival.
The verse novel, targeted at young adults in troubling times, explores issues of grief, depression, vulnerability and hope from the perspective of troubled teen Jez.
It is inspiration that Michelle A Taylor says would never have found her if not for her qualifications as an occupational therapist – a career path that thrust her into the realms of adolescent angst and drug-induced despair, working for more than 10 years in the field of mental illness in Brisbane and overseas.
Sensing an intuitive affinity with the issues and challenges plaguing young people in particular, Taylor began to channel her bent for poetry into a complex fictional story, the concept of which won her a $10,000 grant from Arts Queensland to further her idea.
Though newly fashionable, Taylor’s genre of choice was also the only vehicle through which she felt her story could be told.
“The verse novel has certainly become popular during the last five years or so, thanks in part to the work of authors like Dorothy Porter, but I think people can get too hung up on genres as a means of categorisation,” Taylor said. “At the end of the day, a piece of writing has to stand on its own merit.”
The Angel of Barbican Highhas received favourable reviews from Brisbane literati and from perhaps its toughest audience – young adults and mental health patients.
“It’s nice to hear young people saying that while they would never have read poetry in the past, they wanted to with this book,” Taylor said.
The University of Queensland’s Department of Occupational Therapy is promoting Michelle A Taylor’s novel in conjunction with Occupational Therapy Week (October 21-27). The Angel of Barbican Highwill be launched at the Subverse Queensland Poetry Festival on 20 October at 2pm.
Media: For further information or to arrange an interview, contact Carrie Schofield (telephone 3346 4713 or mobile 0401 996 847).
