I am a writer and a teacher, a reader and a viewer.
My first novel Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves, published by Penguin in 2017 and based on the life of my grandmother, is set in agricultural England in the 1940s and 1950s. It was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction in 2018 and I was lucky enough to be chosen as a Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in Wales. My short story Wires, set in Milan in 1926, was longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s W. S. Pritchett Prize in 2019. I am currently finishing a second novel, set in Northern Italy in the 1920s and 1930s.
Before writing fiction, I worked as an academic at Middlesex University, teaching and writing about 19th century, colonial and post-colonial literatures and histories of publishing and reading.
I have contributed reviews and articles to a wide range of magazines and journals including Sight and Sound, Radical Philosophy, English Literary History, New Left Review and the London Review of Books blog.
On this site, you can read more about Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves: reviews, interviews and pieces about the writing and the research process. I also post short fiction and non-fiction pieces, as well as criticism about books, TV and film.