Writer

I am an award-winning nonfiction writer interested in cultural history, nature and environment, art and design. I am currently writing up my archival research from the Penguin Archive, University of Bristol for an academic book. This explores a creative community of artists, editors, printers, and writers who worked through the Second World War to develop the pioneering Puffin Picturebook series (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). My next project will be a creative nonfiction book about the Norfolk Broads and climate change. The Rough Guide to Food (Penguin, 2009, co-authored) won the Guild of Food Writers’ Derek Cooper Award for investigative writing in 2010. Jane Austen in Bath was published by the New York Review of Books in 2006.

As a professional writer I have researched, written and produced many reports, evaluations and booklets. I led the team that developed a new creative and cultural strategy for Bath & North-East Somerset Council and created the public facing publication (2015). In 2014, I was one of a team of Directors of Craneworks CIC, whose aim was to ignite ambition among the public, businesses and the local council for an innovative creative making space in the city.

My research report ‘The Role of the Editor: Publisher Perspectives’, for the two-year AHRC-funded project The Academic Book of the Future, was published by UCL Press in 2018. I was invited to talk about my research at the project’s Academic Book Week events (2015, 2017) and the University Press Redux conference (2018, British Library).