Louise Wallwein

she/her Contact Patron

Louise Wallwein is an award-winning working-class poet, playwright and performer from Manchester, notorious as an explosive artist who detonates her audiences’ imaginations. Her lauded 2016 show GLUE - a frank and gripping true story of her meeting her birth mother, three decades after being put up for adoption - was supported by Contact and went on to be a bestselling book and hit BBC Radio 4 drama. Louise has long been a passionate advocate for Contact’s work, lending her talents to support them, including headline poetry and mixology event, Cocktails and Cinquains.

"I exploded into my first workshop. I was a volatile child and I had just left the care system. The world was afire with homophobia and youth unemployment. Contact became the place where I could test out my politics and learn to express them through Poetry and Theatre. It threw me a lifeline, and at the same time taught me how to be a collaborator. I wrote my first play aged 17. It took a while longer to become a professional artist, but when I did, I kept on detonating in Contact and many other theatres across the UK and around the world. Most of all though Contact was the first place I could just be Me."

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