RECENT WRITING
Latest Work
I've written features, reviews and opinion pieces for publications such asThe New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Granta, The Bookseller, Literary Review, The LA Review of Books, Elephant, Garage and Artsy. Commission me.
For The Atlantic I wrote about the phenomenon surrounding Adam Curtis, a BBC documentary maker and unlikely hero to today's young leftists.
For MEL magazine I wrote about the trend of portraying certain authors as the preserve of toxic men and spoke about why, rather than redressing wrongs, this trope is reductive and lazy.
I reviewed Nadia Terranova's Martoglio Prize-winning Farewell Ghosts for The Guardian.
For The Times Literary Supplement, I wrote on the future of documenting author correspondence in an age of instant communication.
For The Bookseller I wrote on the financial realities of being a writer in 2020, speaking to two authors on how they afford to create while keeping the lights on.
For Granta's end of year 'best books' feature, I wrote about Magda Szabó's The Door, spirituality, faith and food.
I went to Oslo to interview one of Norway's foremost authors, Vigdis Hjorth, whose novel Will and Testament has been published in English for the first time by Verso. We spoke about philosophy, the Norwegian literary tradition and fiction vs. reality for the LA Review of Books.
For the Guardian I explored Shakespeare & Company's status as a bookshop, tourist trap and literary mecca, for its hundred-year anniversary.
For Port Magazine I wrote on Dawson's Heights, a modernist housing estate in south-east London, focusing on its radical architecture and politics.
Image: Sadie Catt
I was commissioned by Elephant magazine to interview Jarman-Award-nominated artist Imran Perretta. We talked about way his works interrogate society, the political culture of their manufacture and his artistic influences.
Image: the destructors, Imran Perretta (2019)
I was asked by Artsy to write on the queer potentials of the painting Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters. In it I explored how we talk about historical representations of queerness in a modern context.
Image: Musée du Louvre
For Granta I wrote a lyrical essay on misogyny, the demonisation of women throughout history, the #MeToo movement, vagina dentata, Lorena Bobbitt, and the dream of being able to fight back.
For Elephant magazine I examined the recent spate of retrospectives focusing on the seminal gay artists of the 1980s, and questioned the line between celebration and sanitisation.
In honour of Tate Modern's landmark retrospective, I wrote for Artsy on Pierre Bonnard and Edward Vuillard and their use of colour to signal domesticity.
For Garage Magazine I wrote on fashion's love affair with the Big Pink Dress, featuring Killing Eve, Rihanna and the 2019 Oscar's.
I was commissioned by Unseen Platform to explore the themes of intimacy and distance in the photographs of Celine Bodin, Randa Mirza & Lara Tabet and Chloe Rosser.
For Artsy I wrote about essentialism and feminism in the works of 1970s artist Hannah Wilke, and how critics have begun to reappraise her legacy.
For Artsy I wrote about up-and-coming photographer Tabitha Barnard's images of her teenage sisters, focusing on their synthesis of violence and tenderness.
