Portrait by Sophie Davidson 2022.
Contact
I am represented by Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates
Forthcoming and new work
Haruspex, an essay on Granta.com (published December 2023)
Pre-order the book Red Roses by artist Magali Reus in which I have a series of texts entitled ‘Jam Tomorrow’ (out February 6th, 2024)
Pre-order the new edition of London Feeds Itself, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (out March 2024)
Pre-order the anthology By the River, Essays from the Water’s Edge, published by Daunt (out April 2024)
Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen
Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen was published 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.
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.
My conversation about Small Fires at the London Review of Books bookshop with Jonathan Nunn is available to listen to here.
Selected Writing
Available to Read Online
The Recipe, an extract of SMALL FIRES in Granta magazine (issue 160)
Qualities of Earth an essay on Granta.com
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
Books and Print
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 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 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, 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 a co-editor of Vittles.
Rebecca May Johnson 