Living with disability on Kaurna Country, Michèle Saint-Yves primarily writes for performance – stage, screen and poetry – and on occasion has directed and produced plays and short films, with several short stories and poems published in journals and anthologies. Michèle published her first book of poetry LAMENT with Friendly Street Poets Inc in October 2021 after winning their Single Poets Competition 2021. She is completing her debut novel with its novella version shortlisted for UK’s MsLexia Novella Fiction Prize 2019.
Michèle loves swimming in wild water places and thunderstorms and dancing in the rain when able. In 2020 she graduated as a medico-neuroscientist winning UniSA Cancer Research Institute’s Cancer Biology Prize and was in the top three of Brain Injury SA’s Most Inspiring Individual Award 2020.
“I write with the intention for audiences to come away with a greater caring for the otherness in each other–however that manifests. I began writing to paint with words what my symptoms felt like to advocate for myself with specialists, which in turn aided my medical journey. Writing now aids my ability to live in a model of living well enough in ‘my ordinary stuff of life’, the medical path having ended. It is a vehicle to take what is happening to me in my whole kaleidoscope of life (with disability one prism, sexuality another etc.), articulate and envisage it and then make meaning out of my experience, with an eye to being of service.”