Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology grad student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning death from the academic to the deeply personal. She struggled with grief and talking about, particularly as a young woman, realising while death is everywhere in our culture, grief is harder to find in specialist ways.
This Inkling combines academic study with memoir to discuss the popularity of murder as entertainment in true crime podcasts; women working in the death industry; Naomi's love of horror and what it's like writing horror movies for a living when your mum was maybe murdered; the rise of death peer support groups; and death rituals in other countries. Happy Death Club provides a frank, touching and sometimes hilarious look at death, grief, and bereavement.
About the author
Naomi Westerman is a playwright and former anthropologist. As an anthropologist, Naomi studied death rituals around the world, also working on mental health and gender. She changed careers and became a professional writer in 2015, and since then her work has been widely performed at theatres in London and across the UK and internationally, including in the West End and off-Broadway. Her first TV series ‘The Faulty Elephants’, a comedy-drama about the world’s first all-disabled criminal heist gang, is currently in development. She is a recipient of the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Michael Grandage Futures Bursary, the Derby Theatre / In Good Co Mid-Career Commission Award, and was a finalist for the Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award at the Young Vic. Her play ‘Batman’ is currently running in London, community project ‘Mudlarking’ opens at the Bush Theatre in March 2023, and her play ‘Puppy’ runs Oct-Nov 2023 in London. Happy Death Club is her first non-fiction book.
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