Lisette Auton
Lisette Auton lives in a landlocked town in northeast England. She wishes that she’d been born by the sea like the rest of her sprawling family, but makes up for this by escaping to the coast whenever possible.
Lisette creates award winning work as an author, playwright, poet, and film and theatre maker. Her debut middle-grade novel, The Secret of Haven Point, was released in February 2022 by Puffin/Penguin Random House UK and was shortlisted for five awards. It was followed by Times Book of the Week The Stickleback Catchers, Lights Up and The Starlight Rebel.
As a playwright, Lisette has been commissioned to write for organisations such as Live Theatre, Unfolding Theatre, Novo Theatre. Her play text Wintry Tales is published by Methuen Drama.
Lisette is an award-winning published and performance poet; a Penguin Random House UK WriteNow mentee; the 2019 Early Careers Fellow for Literature at Cove Park; on the TSS Publishing list of Best British & Irish Flash Fiction; winner of the Journal Culture Awards 2021 Performance of the Year for Writing the Missing — a River Cycle, commissioned by Durham Book Festival; and TVCA Artist of the Year 2024.
Lisette’s work focuses on identity, curiosity and play, kindness, and access. Disabled, neurodivergent, and northern, some say she’s a word artist, she says she does stuff with words. She works as a solo artist, with collaborators, and alongside wonderful humans as a creative practitioner, specialising in working with elders, children, and those within the justice system.
Her work lives on the page and also often leaps off it as performance or installation. You’ll find Lisette’s work in galleries, online, in theatres and bookshops, as well as random places such as laundrettes and railway station waiting rooms.