About

Dear Reader

For nearly four decades, I have had the privilege of serving with the World’s Children’s Prize Foundation – an international human rights organisation dedicated to elevating the voices and rights of children around the globe. Throughout this time, I have borne witness to hundreds of stories, particularly those of women and children living on the fragile edges of poverty, war, and domestic struggle.

As a lifelong student of the narrative arts and African oral traditions, I followed a quiet but insistent longing: to understand how healing and story are not only kindred in spirit, but also in science. In 2015, I began a doctoral journey at the University of Cape Town to explore the convergence of narrative arts therapy and Indigenous healing practices. The result, a transdisciplinary PhD awarded in 2020, became a weaving of multiple lineages – scientific, artistic, psychological, literary, and ancestral.

This research became the foundation for a narrative arts healing programme developed in partnership with Indigenous communities in Southern Africa and the Dulwich Centre in Australia, a global leader in narrative therapy.

Today, I continue to walk this path through my practice and postdoctoral research – exploring the neuroscience of storytelling and the brain’s remarkable, evolutionary instinct to create meaning through pattern, image, rhythm, and word.

Warmly

Marlene