American Writers’ Week: Alison Bechdel

About this event

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 careerPart of the British Library’s American Writers’ Week (28 September – 2 October 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.Buy tickets for two or more American Writers’ Week events and save 25% on your basket.In association with The Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania.