Unwritten Woman

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Unwritten Woman is a searching, expansive collection that asks who is allowed space on the page and who is left in the margins. Moving between personal elegy and cultural critique, Hannah Lavery writes to her lost father while also turning a clear, questioning eye on the silenced women embedded in familiar stories, from gothic classics to contemporary life.

The poems listen for voices overlooked or deliberately muted. Women of colour stand at the centre rather than the edge, speaking with urgency, humour, and anger, refusing to remain ornamental or unnamed. Literature, history, and lived experience are woven together, not to settle arguments but to expose the gaps where meaning has been withheld.

Written with precision and emotional range, Unwritten Woman is both intimate and outward-looking. It invites readers to reconsider what they have accepted as complete, and to notice whose absence has been normalised. What emerges is not a manifesto, but a sustained act of attention, and a quiet insistence that stories change when the women inside them are finally allowed to speak.