The Culture of Dying Matters Festival – held at St James’s Hospital in Leeds this week – brought together staff, volunteers, city partners and members of the public to hear personal stories and performances about end of life.
It’s all part of the national Dying Matters Awareness Week 2025 campaign (5 – 11 May), which challenges the taboo of talking about dying in wider society, shares traditions and stories about care at the end of life, and supports healthy conversations around death, bereavement and grief.
“Conversations about death and dying are challenging for all of us, but it’s important we can open up about this natural part of life that will happen to all of us. Art, poetry and creative responses are vital in helping us meaningfully engage and reflect.”
Faye Marshall, Palliative Care Specialist Nurse and performance poet
Faye Marshall is a Specialist Nurse in the Palliative Care team at LTHT who cares for patients at end of life and their families. Outside of her nursing career, Faye is also a performance poet who has hosted creative workshops in the UK and around the world. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies, and her debut pamphlet, Throwing Sugar on the Fire, has just been published by Yaffle Press.
On the surface, poetry and nursing seem like two distinct practices, but Faye has discovered that her creative work has helped profoundly shape the way she approaches caring for her patients.
Faye said: “Having worked in palliative care for over 10 years, I have come to realise how nursing is an art form in itself. Nurses are required to be creative and collaborative every day, across all specialities, however, with end of life care we have one chance to get it right. That’s why I approach both my clinical work and my creative writing with the same ethos of seeking compassion, meaning and humanity, which underpins our collective need as a society.”
Faye was one of the performance poets speaking at the Culture of Dying Matters Festival —a platform for sharing how different cultures and communities experience, honour and talk about death and dying. It was an opportunity to share personal responses and to prompt reflection and discussion about these important themes.
Faye said: “Conversations about death and dying are challenging for all of us, but it’s important we can open up about this natural part of life that will happen to all of us. Art, poetry and creative responses are vital in helping us meaningfully engage and reflect, which is exactly what we are trying to achieve with our Culture of Dying Matters Festival in Leeds this week.”
Led by the Palliative Care Team at LTHT, this event brings together staff, community partners, performers, charities and cultural voices from across Leeds and West Yorkshire. A full programme of events across the Trust has been designed to encourage reflection and open up conversations about death, dying and bereavement. A line-up of live performances includes a staff-patient choir made of people affected by cancer ‘Unity the After Cure Choir’, spoken word and poetry performances from three regional independent poets followed by two staff poets. The event will also feature a Dying Matters Library and Dying Matters Cinema, showcasing how literature and film can spark thought and conversation.
Yunus Wynn, Specialist Nurse in the Palliative Care team, said: “Death is a universal experience but not yet a universal conversation. This festival is part of a national effort to normalise discussions around dying, improve end of life care planning and celebrate the diversity of traditions and beliefs within our communities. By working with partners from across the city we aim to show that Leeds is a city that cares about the culture of dying.”
The Palliative Care team works alongside other clinical teams to support the care of people who are living with a progressive life-limiting illness. Palliative care can be helpful alongside other ways of managing someone’s condition, by focusing on symptom management and emotional support, whilst offering support to friends, relatives, and carers. The team supports people through decisions about future treatment or place of care and provides advice on psychological, social and spiritual issues important to the person.
LTHT is part of the Leeds Palliative Care Network working to improve end of life care and through working with partners across the city.
The national campaign run by Hospice UK is being celebrated and marked by organisations up and down the country, aiming to get more people talking about death and dying and what matters to them.