Anita Goveas has been our 2025 London Writer In Residence. Anita trained as a speech and language therapist before switching careers in 2015 and having the time to write. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize, and has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfictions and a Pushcart Prize. She also has two stories in Best Microfictions 2019, made the BIFFY 50 2018-19 and 2019-20 lists and the 2021 Wigleaf Top 50 list. Her debut flash fiction collection Families and other natural disasters was published by Reflex Press. She has run writing workshops for a range of places including Dahlia Publishing’s ‘A Brief Pause‘ writer’s development programme, and for Retreat West, Writers HQ, the Crow Collective and Spread the Word’s CripTic salons.
Anita’s residency is in partnership and hosted by Bethlem Gallery. Established in 1997, the gallery provides a professional space for high-quality artwork and fosters a supportive artist-focused environment. Bethlem Gallery’s vision is an equitable society where art and mental health are a valued part of every day, and works with artists to lead change in health and society.
I was thrilled when I discovered Creative Future was supporting a residency at Bethlem Gallery. I’d experienced it as a casual visitor and always admired it as a creative space. It opened up my ideas of what art could be, that it could be personal and made from different types of materials. I looked forward to being able to take some time to focus on my writing, something I always struggle with.
The Gallery is on the third site of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the first asylum in England set up for the treatment of mental illness. It encourages collaboration and wellbeing- there’s a weekly writing group, and a very energetic performance collective. I enjoyed working out how to link the workshops I was running with the collection exhibited at the time ( a retrospective of artists who previously been exhibited at the gallery, and whose art often tells a story), meeting and talking to people about their writing, and spending time in the gallery and the beautiful surrounding grounds to write stories and be inspired.
I started writing when I developed health difficulties as a way of trying to process changes I had no control over so it had always felt like something I had to struggle with, that it wasn’t supposed to be something I enjoyed. It’s still a little bit intimidating, looking at the blank page and making something appear just from the contents of my slightly unreliable brain.
I like to write because I like to watch other people and try and figure out what they’re doing and why they might be doing it. After my health declined, I felt a little detached from the world, that I didn’t quite fit in it anymore. It helped to be able to focus on something outside myself, but I’ve always second guessed whether I deserved all the good things that came out of the writing (like having a book published or the lovely people I’ve met along the way.) I hadn’t wanted to write to have stories or a book published, it was more of a way of expressing myself, of dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings so I obviously couldn’t be a real writer.
The time I’ve spent on the residency has been invigorating. There’s something about sharing your practice and writing journey and listening to other people talk about their writing that helps you feel more grounded in where you are yourself and helps you appreciate what you’ve done and what you want to do. I spent a long time feeling that writing wasn’t something for people like me, and not questioning the subconscious messages I’d picked up about who could be writers from the books I’d read at school and even the writers I’d seen in movies and on TV. Feeling that if I couldn’t write like Shakespeare or if I wasn’t aiming to write a sweeping epic like War and Peace, that my writing wasn’t worth anything.
The gallery is the perfect place to explore and develop writing practice because it’s all about creativity and wellbeing.
I’ve always felt that writing should be accessible for everyone who wants to write, and that wanting to write for the joy of it is important, that it doesn’t have to be about how much it will sell or who will read it. At the gallery I was surrounded by other people’s work that embodied those feelings, and I feel so much more secure in my sense of self as a writer.
