Opportunities
SciTalk: Connecting Writers & Scientists
The SciTalk project aims to link fiction–writers with scientists. Science isn’t just physics, chemistry and biology. These days the boundaries are blurred: if you browse the SciTalk database you will find scientists (male or female, single or with families, students or professors …) who are working on the chemical properties of frog foam, using virtual reality in pain relief, molecular genetics to look at dinosaur fossils, mathematics to understand patterns of animal movement … and much, much more.
The scientists contributing to SciTalk are self-selected enthusiasts and even if they can’t answer all your questions, they are likely to know another scientist who can!
SciTalk is also about meeting and communicating. As fiction-writers you will have the opportunity to visit the lab or workplace of the scientist with whom you make contact – to see how and where ‘science’ is done, who does it, and why; to look at images, learn the jargon; to meet other members of the research group; to talk, to listen and generally to exchange views.
And just as writers will learn that scientists do not conform to the stereotypical characters found in some fictions, so scientists will also learn how writers work. If this results in good science and scientists as realistic characters being written about – and then being read about or watched in performance - everyone will have gained.
So, if you are a fiction-writer in search of characters or inspiration, please go to www.scitalk.org.uk and enjoy browsing the topics; contact a scientist or three, meet up and chat… Please also look at the ’events’ and ’media interest’ sections of the site to see what has been happening, and follow links to articles and the ’Subtle Science’ short stories. Enjoy having your eyes opened, and be inspired!
SciTalk was devised and set up by Ann Lackie (the novelist Ann Lingard) and Peter Normington (Ardus), with initial help from NESTA.
For further information please contact:
Email: enquiries@scitalk.org.uk