English

I moved to Exeter’s Cornwall campus  from the University of Kent in 2010, after a year at the University of Iceland. My academic background is in research on eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, with a particular interest in Romanticism, travel writing, food writing and women’s fiction. I’ve published on polar exploration (The Frozen Ship, BlueBridge, 2007), the cultural history of chocolate (Chocolate: a global history, co-authored with Alexander Badenoch, Reaktion, 2009) and food in Georgian fiction (Spilling the Beans: eating, cooking, reading and writing in British women’s fiction 1770 – 1840, Manchester University Press, 2009). But for the last few years I’ve been concentrating on writing fiction. My first novel, Cold Earth, was published by Granta in 2009 and my second, Night Waking, will appear, also with Granta, in February 2011. I’m now working on a travel book about the year in Iceland, called Leave of Absence and under contract with Granta,  and beginning to think about a third novel, set in Falmouth where I now live.