Elanor Dymott

Elanor Dymott is the author of three novels, Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Cape, 2012, and in translation), Silver and Salt (Cape, 2017) and Slack-Tide (2019). Her novels are published by W.W. Norton in the US, and her short stories are published in Stand, the Warwick Review and Algebra, and in anthologies such as Xo Orpheus (Penguin USA) and Novel of the World (Mondadori, 2015).

Born in Chingola, Zambia, she grew up in the US, the UK and Indonesia. She read English at Oxford while working as a musician, a waitress and a film extra. She went to law school, then practiced commercial law in the City of London and in Southeast Asia, including stints in insurance litigation and corporate finance. In Singapore, she worked in project and asset finance (buying and selling aeroplanes), and commercial litigation. In her late twenties, she took Ian McEwan’s advice that would-be writers should get a job requiring them to write every day, and became a law reporter for the Times and the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting. For a decade she covered the High Court and the Court of Appeal, reporting cases which either changed existing law, made new law or were otherwise noteworthy.

She lives in London, where she is writing more fiction and runs writing workshops. She mentors new novelists and works as a reader and judge for prizes administered by the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature. As often as possible, she swims in the sea off the Peloponnesian coast.