Welcome to Lucy Writers, an online platform devoted to showcasing the writing of women and non-binary creatives.

Lucy Writers is an online platform showcasing the very best writing and artwork from women and non-binary creatives all over the world. In collaboration with Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, the platform brings together past and current Lucy students as well as creatives from outside the college community. Lucy Writers welcomes submissions from women and non-binary writers irrespective of whether they’re an established or new-to-the-writing-desk writer. We want to hear from you; let Lucy Writers be the space, room and home for your words.

Dwaal by Irenosen Okojie

  Irenosen Okojie

In this courageous and powerful piece, Irenosen Okojie discusses the emotional abuse and exploitation Black women creatives have experienced in various arts industries and calls for greater accountability amongst white male perpetrators.

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Queer Tricks & Hermaphrodite Dances – Nino Strachey’s Young Bloomsbury: A New Queer History

  Lottie Whalen

Mapping the intricacies of a dazzling social world, Nino Strachey’s intergenerational history of the Bloomsbury Group traces and celebrates the queer lineage that extended beyond the confines of ‘Old Bloomsbury’, in an open, generous account that is both biography and cultural history.

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Motion and other poems by Catherine Norris

  Catherine Norris

Catherine Norris exquisitely captures the intimate bodily nature of loss and joy, pleasure and pain across four poems. If in ‘Motion’ the memorable feelings of hurt and grief slip between tenses, then in ‘Oceanic’ pleasure unspools moment by moment, and the magical knowledge of life on earth expands star by star.

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Hit Parade of Tears: Stories by Izumi Suzuki – the emotional disparities of dystopia

  Jennifer Brough

The second English-language publication of Izumi Suzuki’s short stories delves deeper into the politics of feeling and the future’s dark underbelly.   

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After the ellipsis by Alex Keramidas

  Alex Keramidas

In Alex Keramidas’ incisive poem in miniature, a struggle of life and death occurs across multiple forms – and bodies – blurring the humanity of one with the sinister “insecticide” of another.

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Blood and Cord: Writers on Early Parenthood

  Rym Kechacha

Blood and Cord brings a multiplicity of voices together to explore and celebrate the diverse experiences of parenthood. From the raw bodily sensations of baby rearing to the immanence of beauty in the everyday, this anthology captures it all, writes Rym Kechacha.

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Lucy Writers Announces the Publication of its Arts Council England Funded Anthology, What the Water Gave Us

  Lucy Writers

Lucy Writers announces its new Arts Council England funded anthology, What the Water Gave Us, published by Takeaway Press, featuring fourteen women and non-binary writers from migrant backgrounds.

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Death, desire, and the afterlife of the mind in Jessica Widner’s Interiors

  Vartika Rastogi

Jessica Widner’s Interiors powerfully and profoundly goes beyond one man’s tragic and mysterious death to ask questions about the afterlife, alternative worlds, embodiment and the (inter)relationships that make up life itself.

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False Rivers by Davina Quinlivan

  Davina Quinlivan

In Davina Quinlivan’s beautiful, elegiac poem a speaker attempts to recall and piece together childhood memories through the slipstream of images, characters and moments from films like Blade Runner and Mermaids.

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Authenticity as Oxymoron: Emily Bootle’s This Is Not Who I Am

  Lisa Goodrum

From influencers promoting the latest wellness fad to the ‘messy heroine’ trope of recent hit TV shows, the concept of authenticity has never been more widely preached, obsessed over and marketed writes Lisa Goodrum in her review of Emily Bootle’s persuasive new book, This Is Not Who I Am.

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An interview with author Siân Hughes: ‘the heart of the mystery is this dangerous ground of motherhood’

  Rym Kechacha

Rym Kechacha talks with author Siân Hughes about her debut novel, Pearl, the importance of medieval poetry to its themes, motherhood, grief and postpartum depression, and her research and writing process.

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Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge

  Julia Bagguley

Art historian Julia Bagguley gives an introduction to the extraordinary artist at the centre of Kettle’s Yard’s latest exhibition, Lucie Rie, and celebrates her almost alchemical ability to make stunning pots, buttons, bowls and vases.

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In conversation with Ennatu Domingo: ‘To belong somewhere new, you have to feel at peace with the place you left behind’

  Emily Walters

Our contributor Emily Walters talks to author Ennatu Domingo about the recent publication of her new book, Burnt Eucalyptus Wood, adoption and a nomadic sense of being, the centrality of language to identity, filmic narrative structures and the power of nostalgia in Ethiopian culture.

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Escape Room by Bryony Littlefair – deliciously absurd vignettes of the everyday

  Lauren Steele

In Bryony Littlefair’s poetic exploration of the everyday, the dreaded dinner party or 9-5 grind are brilliantly subverted to an absurd extreme exposing the anxieties and struggles experienced by all in a capitalistic, corporately ruled society.

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An interview with acclaimed author Dr Pragya Agarwal: ‘Men write smart thinking books and women are not taken seriously until they write a memoir.’

  Georgia Poplett

Our writer Georgia Poplett talks to scientist and author Dr Pragya Agarwal about what led her to write her latest book, Hysterical, the damaging history of gendered emotions, representation in data, subverting the classics and why the (feminist) future is bright – and furious!

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The Place of Memory/The Memory of Place: Pramila Venkateswaran’s Sthalapurana for Kochi

  Basudhara Roy

Creating a ‘fine latticework of sentiment and language’, Pramila Venkateswaran’s latest poetry collection, We are Not a Museum, resurrects place and memory to become a powerful sthalapurana for the city of Kochi and the lives of the Jewish peoples in it.

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In conversation with author Ashley Nelson Levy: ‘I wanted to write about the grief that comes with not feeling at home in your body and how your body can dictate the shape of your home.’

  Vartika Rastogi

Vartika Rastogi talks to acclaimed author Ashley Nelson Levy about her debut novel Immediate Family, the literary tropes and cultural narratives around adoption, motherhood, the body and female desire since the overturning of Roe v Wade.

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Voyager: The Constellations of Memory by Nona Fernández – a cosmic stellar tapestry

  Iona Glen

Nona Fernández’s new book, Voyager: The Constellations of Memory, translated by Natasha Wimmer, combines astronomy’s physics with astrology’s storytelling to express the importance of memory, family and record-keeping.

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The Deal: a short story by Laetitia Erskine

  Laetitia Erskine

The nuances and complexities of a troubled mother-daughter relationship are beautifully rendered in this short story, adapted from Laetitia Erskine’s novel Women on Women.

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Relative Change: a poem by Liz MacWhirter

  Liz MacWhirter

Elemental reactions spark a primal, protective dissolution and reformation of the female body, in this beautifully vivid poem by Liz MacWhirter.

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Formulating an Ethics of Vulnerability: Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart

  Basudhara Roy

Bhanu Kapil’s award-winning poetry collection, How to Wash a Heart, argues for our essential and shared vulnerability as a global society, a keener acceptance of our physical, mental and cultural differences, and a more humane and humanistic social discourse, writes poet and scholar Basudhara Roy. 

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Riambel by Priya Hein: a sensual and deceptively simple evocation of generational slavery

  Laetitia Erskine

Priya Hein’s poetic, visceral novel addresses the devastating legacies of slavery, racial injustice and economic disparity in Mauritius, layering the stories of fifteen year old Noemi and those of her enslaved ancestors to lay bare the brutal realities of colonialism, writes Laetitia Erskine.

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A hunger to be free: James Hannaham’s Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

  Vartika Rastogi

Hilarious, heartbreaking and unapologetically original, James Hannaham’s Joyce-inspired odyssey of a novel centres trans heroine Carlotta Mercedes and her experience of ‘re-entering society’ after 22 years of unjust incarceration.

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The Poet in the Machine by Kinneson Lalor and JP Seabright

  Kinneson Lalor

In their new collection Machinations, Kinneson Lalor and JP Seabright take inspiration from Alan Turing and the world of artificial intelligence, creating poems that are conversations not only between two poets, but between poet and machine. Here, they share their experiences when working on the collection, along with some of the resulting poems.

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Swanfolk: Strange swan-filled dreams in a near-dystopian future

  Jennifer Brough

This slim poetic prose novel by Kristín Ómarsdóttir and translated by Vala Torodds takes on larger-than-life themes in a world where the imagination bleeds into reality. 

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