I grew up in Essex and Devon and am now based in Bristol. In 2022, I won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Intervals, my first book. Blending personal and social history, Intervals describes living with my mum at the end of her life, exploring questions of choice, care and creativity under austerity. As part of the prize, I spent five weeks as a writer-in-residence at Mahler & Lewitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, where I produced a pamphlet titled ‘Inventive Forms of Love’. Intervals was longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

I’m interested in craft of all kinds; feminist and abolitionist approaches to care; and the connections between the environment, storytelling and social transformation. I’m tentatively working on a novel exploring beauty, history and desire through psychoanalytic case studies.

I have a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, and have taught English literature in university and community settings. My academic research explored nineteenth-century poetry collections, encyclopaedias, colour charts and museum archives as sites of ‘fugitive knowledge’ - scrappy, recalcitrant materials that resist systematisation. I have presented my research at conferences convened by the University of Oxford, the University of York, Freie Universität Berlin, Paris Sorbonne, Princeton University, and Stockholm University. In 2020, I co-edited a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on Sibylline leaves, exploring literary fragments, mediation and prophecy.

Previously, I studied English at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and have worked as a copyeditor for academic journals, news outlets and publishers (as well as - at various points, in various places - a bartender, bookseller, waiter, tutor, shelf-stacker and footnoter-for-hire). I now work at Platform, a charity campaigning for climate and social justice.

Publicity photos - credit: Alexander Burton.