Myriad novelist Hannah Vincent (Alarm Girl) will appear alongside fellow writers Julia Crouch and Matt Haig, and psychotherapist Dr Alec Grant, on a panel discussing the ways in which literature addresses the theme of suicide, as part of Brighton’s SICK! Festival.

In 1974 the sociologist David Phillips coined the term The Werther Effect, after the hero of a novel by Goethe supposedly inspired copycat suicides. Can talking about suicide really result in contagion? These panels bring together academics, writers who work with people suffering from depression, novelists who deal with the subject, and those who write about the subject from the point of view of the depressed.

Hannah Vincent’s debut novel, Alarm Girl, follows eleven-year-old Indigo and her older brother Robin as they arrive in South Africa to stay with their father. Indigo must navigate her family’s uneasy silence surrounding her mother’s recent death but, unable to find solace in a foreign landscape, she begins to harbour violent suspicions in place of the truth.

Tickets cost £8 / £5 concessions. Suitable for ages 16+. Click here for more information.