About American Writers’ Week: Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel emerged in the 1980s with Dykes to Watch Out For, a ground-breaking weekly strip that featured a group of mostly lesbian friends and has gone on to publish a series of acclaimed graphic novels and memoirs. Fun Home explored her closeted, funeral-director father’s suicide and her coming out: it subsequently became an award-winning musical, recently revived in Manchester. It was followed by Are You My Mother?, on psychoanalysis and her relationship with her mother, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, about her compulsive exercising, and most recently Spent, featuring a semi fictionalised Alison Bechdel who writes and draws in rural Vermont, reflects on her career, campaigns for progressive causes and hangs out with her wife, friends and characters from her earlier work.
Alison joins writer Catherine Riley in conversation for a revealing look across her creative career
Part of the British Library’s American Writers’ Week (28 September – 2 November 2026), presented in association with Festival America, Vincennes, France. Participating writers include Alison Bechdel, Armistead Maupin, Daniel Kraus, Jeanine Cummins, Joyce Carol Oates, Katie Kitamura and Rabih Alameddine and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
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Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel is the author of many internationally acclaimed graphic memoirs.
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These include Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (2012), The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021) and most recently Spent: A Comic Novel (2025). Fun Home was a New York Times bestseller, won an Eisner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named a Best Book of the 21st Century by the Guardian, was adapted as a broadway musical which won five Tony Awards and was recently revived at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life – queer and otherwise – considered 'one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre' and which introduced the so-called Bechdel test.
Catherine Riley
Catherine Riley is the author of Is This Love?, published by Serpents Tail, which was long-listed for the 2023 Polari First Book prize.
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She is an expert on contemporary feminist publishing in the UK and the author of Feminism and Women’s Writing: An Introduction and The Virago Story, as well as a contributor to various anthologies focused on women's writing and publishing. Currently, she works as Director of Strategy, Communications and External Affairs at Stonewall, the UK's leading LGBTQ+ charity. She is also working on the draft of her second novel, tentatively titled Bossed.
Venue and bar opening times
This event will take place in the British Library Knowledge Centre and is also available to watch online. Tickets may be booked to attend in person, or to watch online.
If you are attending in person, please note that the Knowledge Centre and the bar will be open in advance of your event.
Please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event. If you have specific access requirements please email customer@bl.uk
Attending the event online
If you book an online ticket, you will receive the viewing link on the morning of the event. You can either watch the event live or during the next 14 days on catch up.
Concessions
There are a range of concessions available. These include discounts for British Library Members, Young Persons (16 – 25s), and visitors on Universal/Pension Credit and free entry for carers.
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