portrait by sarah white. 2023.

Contact

I am represented by Harriet Moore at Aitken Alexander please contact her with any enquiries

I am currently writing my second book, MEAL TIME, to be published by Jonathan Cape in the UK, and Ecco in the US.

Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen 

*Winner of the inaugural Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Drink Scholarship in 2024!*

Small Fires was first published in hardback in the UK in August 2022 by Pushkin Press. Small Fires received reviews in The Observer, The Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the i Paper and The New Statesman. I was interviewed about it for Worms/Another Magazine. I read from it on BBC Radio 3. It was shortlisted for Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year 2022. The paperback of Small Fires was published in September 2023, and was featured in the Guardian’s best paperbacks, and was Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Month for September.

Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen was released in the US on June 6th 2023. It has received reviews in n+1 , LA Review of Books, New Republic, and Galileo Press/Free State Review, a starred review in Foreword Reviews, and interviews in the New York Times, Eater, Vogue.com, Civil Eats, and Foreword Reviews.

My conversation about Small Fires at the London Review of Books bookshop with Jonathan Nunn is available to listen to here.

Selected Writing

Winterwashing, a short story to accompany the exhibition ‘soft crossing’ by Magdalena Skupinska (March 2025)
Doing the Work, Granta (December 2024)
Egg Slicer Christmas Essay, Vogue (December 2024)
Kool  a collaboration with Magali Reus, a short story (June 2024)
Red Roses by artist Magali Reus in which I have a series of texts entitled ‘Jam Tomorrow’ (March 2024)
By the River, Essays from the Water’s Edge, published by Daunt (April 2024)
New edition of London Feeds Itself, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (March 2024)
Haruspex, an essay on Granta.com (published December 2023) 
A kitchenless home, for the Financial Times (2023)
The Recipe, an extract of SMALL FIRES in Granta magazine (issue 160) (2022)
Qualities of Earth an essay on Granta.com (2020)
I Dream of Canteens (2019)
A Partial List of Rome 
What happened when I began to treat cooking like thinking, an essay for the FT Magazine
On Sandwiches, for The Guardian
On Weeds in the London Review of Books online
The recipe for blue was red, my essay in issue #5 of arts journal Bricks from the Kiln (buy here)
Against Roast Chicken, an Hors D’Oeuvres Theory of Cooking  in the anthology In the Kitchen: Essays on Food and Life published by Daunt Books.

About me:

Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen is my first book of nonfiction. I earned a PhD in Contemporary German Literature from UCL in 2016. The monograph based on my research into a rewriting of The Odyssey by German poet Barbara Köhler was published in 2019 by University of London Press.

In May 2024 SMALL FIRES won the inaugural Nach Waxman prize for food and drinks scholarship. In December 2020 I was awarded a Society of Authors grant to support the writing of SMALL FIRES. I was awarded a John R. Murray Creative Writing Residency at the British School in Rome in September 2021. I was nominated for an Arts Foundation Writing Fellowship by Granta in 2020 and by the National Centre for Writing in 2021 . My writing has appeared in Granta, Vogue, The Photographer’s Gallery, The Happy Reader, Luncheon, Tribune, The Plant, Times Literary Supplement, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Grub Zine, and others. The Food Memory Bank was a public archive of food memories I set up and ran for a few years. Dinner Document blog was my recipe diary 2011-2021, since January 2022 it’s been a newsletter on Substack. I am an editor of Vittles.