Bristol-writer Kerry Mead shortlisted for The Curae Prize for unpaid carers

Kerry Mead is a Bristol-based writer of creative nonfiction and fiction whose work explores themes of neurodivergence, place and the human experience.

She is also a carer, whose essay Palmistry was recently shortlisted for The Curae Prize – a free-to-enter literary award that is open to unpaid carers across the UK (of which there are estimated to be 7 million).

The prize was established in 2022 by author, teacher and researcher Anna Vaught to help champion the creative work of carers, as well as offering them mentoring and access to the publishing industry.

Anna Vaught – photo: courtesy of The Curae Prize

Running on a biennial basis, The Curae is the first of its kind. It has been the subject of national industry attention, and support from writers including Kit de Waal.

An anthology collating all the shortlisted short stories and non-fiction essays will be published on November 28 by Renard Press, with all profits going to carers’ charities.

Described as a creative non-fiction piece that incorporates memoir, Mead’s shortlisted essay takes in mother-daughter relationships, the caring role and the difficulty in maintaining a separate sense of self outside the identity imposed by motherhood.

Photo: Renard Press

Palmistry (extract)

          Carrying a child feels like the biggest magic trick in the world. You gaze at the beating blur in front of you at your first scan; later you feel it flutter inside you like it’s trying to fly away. It seems like witchcraft, the ultimate act of creativity, like nothing you or anyone else has experienced before. There is magic in labour as well. In the moments before Ava was born I felt like I’d been plunged into a primordial lake, a dark tide, seemingly endless. I could still hear the midwife’s voice clearly, but it sounded undulating and far away. I was an opening, an unfurling, on the brink of life and death. My edges dissolved. Different from the knowledge during pregnancy that another body was within mine, now the contained self no longer existed. And from that material, another person was cleaved into being. I had also experienced the same dark tide when my son was dangled in front of me shortly after he was born. The pethidine fug cleared for a split second and a heavy sheet of dark, subaqueous matter crept across the operating theatre and curled around both of us, then retreated as he lifted his head to the lights, legs kicking, screwed up his face and screamed for the first time.

          Having been thrust deeply into this state of the apparent infinite and divine, who would want to push away its memory and risk forgetting it for ever? You may never dive into it again, but every time you look at your child out in the world you receive a reminder that it happened, and that the world is not completely rational after all. And then there is the additional ecstasy when the mother looks at her daughter, the knowledge that she has produced a new person in her own image.

I pull my daughter back.

Soon she will start to push me away.

          Both the self and the other need space to retreat into the privacy of the I as a means of creating a solid self-identity, to exist in the wider world as sure-footedly as possible. Just as the mother discovers on one hand how entangled she and her child are, whether feeding off each other or starving each other, she must also learn, on the other hand, to let her child begin to extricate themself for their own good and, ultimately, hers as well.

It is a push

-pull.

Eventually, the child must reject the mother.

But where does this leave me? What is my future, when I’ve given up my I?

To find out more about The Curae, visit www.thecuraeprize.uk. The Anthology is out on November 28, published by Renard Press, with an online launch event at 6pm. It is available for pre-order now.

Main photo: Renard Press

Read more: Caring for Bristol’s young carers

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