Lucy Moore
Non-fiction writer
About
Lucy Moore’s books are narrative nonfiction, historical and broadly biographical. The Thieves’ Opera: the lives and times of Jonathan Wild, thief-taker, and Jack Sheppard, house-breaker (Viking, 1997), her first book, was a double biography of two eighteenth-century villains; her most recent, Nijinsky: a life (Profile, 2013), profiled the legendary Ballets Russes dancer and choreographer.
Throughout her career she has contributed to various television programmes, presenting, acting as talking head and consulting, but her main interest is the potential that books possess to bring the past to life. Her favourite historical period is the French Revolution, inspiration for her sixth book, Liberty: the lives and times of six women in revolutionary France, and her current project is a biography of the English Civil War memoirist and receipt-book writer, Ann Fanshawe.
She lives in south London with her husband and two young sons.
More from Lucy Moore
My Favourite Book, part 3
In ‘My Favourite Book’, RLF writers explain why particular books are so special to them. In this installment of ‘My…
Lucy Moore – Being Genre Fluid
The main reason I struggle to be genre fluid is that to write good historical novels you need two sets…
Lucy Moore – Letter To My Younger Self
Creating a family and a home filled with love; nothing else will matter as much to you, and there’s nothing…
Lucy Moore – Why I Write
They lived in the present tense, without any sense of their future fates, just as we do. Sunlight shone on…
Lucy Moore – A Day In The Life
The daydreaming time, the hanging out the washing time and the walk to school pick-up time; where inspiration can arrive.…
Lucy Moore – My Reading Habits
I’m always hoping to chance upon the kinds of details novelists — lucky things — use to light up their…
Lucy Moore – How I Write
I must not be present-centric as opposed to ethnocentric; I must try and free myself of the assumption that the…
The Joy Of Doing Something Badly
Lucy Moore on why she is happy to remain an Absolute Beginner. When she started ballet lessons, Lucy Moore soon…
Lucy Moore – Rejection
If Rejection is something to be embraced, stimulating the pin-up virtue of our times, resilience, why do I struggle so…
Location And The Writer, part 12
Horatio Clare takes us to poet-haunted Hebden Bridge, Lucy Moore celebrates London by pedal, and Curtis Jobling re-imagines phantoms in…
Lucy Moore, part 2
Lucy Moore speaks with James McConnachie about female French revolutionaries and rebellious maharanis. Lucy Moore speaks with James McConnachie about…
Lucy Moore, part 1
Lucy Moore speaks with James McConnachie about recovering a life from a receipt book, chemistry’s domestic roots and Civil War…
Writing vs Life: A Delicate Matter
In ‘Writing vs Life: A Delicate Matter’, RLF writers speak about real material, privacy and impact on personal life. In…
Amanda Mitchison & Lucy Moore
Amanda Mitchison explores her entanglement with Scottish history, and Lucy Moore ponders the choosing of biographical subjects. Amanda Mitchison shares…
Lucy Moore
Non-fiction writer