ISBN: 9781849911498
Published: 2010
Pages: 89
Key Themes: semiautobiographical, ambition, empowerment, human rights

Description

Molly Cullen is a naive seventeen year old on the brink of the London art scene in the 1960s. Fuelled by dreams of success and fame as an artist, she gains a place at a London art school and it is her dreams that sustain her through the pain and disappointments she faces in the ensuing years.

Molly Cullen is a fast-paced tale of a young womans struggle against tremendous odds. Molly is a survivor but more than that she is a girl who just will not give up. Her tenacity and inner strength help her overcome the loss of innocence and the trials she must face. As Molly comes to terms with, and learns to celebrate, her lesbian identity, the reader travels with her on the roller coaster ride that is her young life.

Mollys thoughts about her world impart a sense of wry humour that tempers the, often painful, experiences described in this semi autobiographical novel. This book is a testament to the resourcefulness and resilience of the human spirit.

About the Author

Born in 1947 in Catford, South-East London, Maureen Oliver studied art at Camberwell Art College where she trained as a painter.

She has variously been a community artist working in hospitals and day centres, local art projects and with prisoners, a campaigner for lesbian and gay rights and an AIDS activist. She was a founder member of Croydon Womens Centre and became one of the Womens Work group of artists at Brixton Artists Collective in the mid eighties, as a survivor herself, Maureen was later active in working for the rights of psychiatric survivors.

Maureen Oliver has been writing poetry and short stories since childhood, and, in the late nineties, after a long period of being effectively silenced by powerful antipsychotic drugs, she began to write again with renewed passion.

She has held a large number of exhibitions of her paintings including in New York in 2007.

Maureen Oliver is a lesbian, a mother and grandmother