About Emily

I live in Lewes, East Sussex with my endlessly patient husband and endlessly energetic two young sons.

In 2012, I was a student of the Faber Academy  novel writing course and was writing alongside my job as a support worker for male, female and transgender sex workers in London. I took the course because I love writing, not because I was necessarily seeking a change in career. It felt too audacious to transform myself into a novelist! 

Very happily, I met my agent, the brilliant Nelle Andrew, soon after the course finished. If You Knew Her was published in the UK by Little, Brown and by Harper US in 2017 and translated into eight other languages.

Grace is Gone followed and was published in February 2020 in the UK and by Harper US and in four other languages. 

I started writing what was to become The Herd in early 2020. Writing a novel about vaccination during the first lockdown in March 2020 was surreal but in September 2020, Transworld pre-empted The Herd. I was thrilled when it was selected for the Richard & Judy book club. Film and TV rights have also been bought at auction by Sharon Horgan’s production company Merman Productions and are in development.

In 2022, I signed a further two book deal with Transworld. Private Lives published in 2025 follows in a similar vein to The Herd, in that it is also about a moral quandary but this time I drew on some of my experiences from my time working for the aforementioned charity. I was inspired to write Private Lives after reading ‘What interests the public is not the same as what is in the public’s interest.’ I’m excited to see how it goes!