I am a novelist and curator. Born in Australia, I spent much of my childhood in
Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. After studying art history at university I worked at
Christies’ Fine Art Auctioneers in London, in the Modern & Impressionist Paintings
Department. I then became a curator at the Tate, organising exhibitions and displays
at both Tate Liverpool and Tate Britain.
I have been lucky enough to work with a great range of artists, from Lucian Freud to
Tracey Emin, and I was the curator of the Turner Prize, the Tate’s annual prize for
contemporary art, for a number of years, as well as overseeing the Duveens and
ArtNow commissions. I have written widely on art and contributed to exhibition
catalogues for artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Jane and Louise Wilson, Anya
Gallaccio and the late Helen Chadwick. I also published a monograph on Julian Opie
for the Tate.
I wrote my first novel, The Book of Lies, which was published by Canongate and
longlisted for the Guardian First Book Prize. After that, I published the non-fiction
memoir, Joseph Gray’s Camouflage through the now sadly defunct press, Unbound.
Joseph Gray’s Camouflage tells the story of my great grandfather, Joseph Gray, who
was an official War artist in the First World War and then went on to work as a
camouflage artist in the Second.
More recently, I returned to fiction. The Stranger’s Companion was published in
2024 by Baskerville and was named by the Times as one of the top ten Historical
Novels of 2024. It is out now in paperback. My new novel, Happily Ever After, was
published in July in hardback, also with Baskerville.
I live in North London, swim every day, and am a volunteer librarian at Keats Library
in Hampstead.
I am represented by Elizabeth Sheinkman at Peters Fraser & Dunlop (PFD) Literary
Agents