Emma John
Non-fiction writer
About
Born near Luton in 1978, Emma John is the author of three nonfiction books whose writing spans numerous fields. As a journalist and long-form writer, her expertise and experience range from sportswriting to theatre criticism, and from travel writing to music history.
As a much-read sportswriter for the Guardian, Emma’s passion for cricket inspired her first book, Following On: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession and Terrible Cricket (Bloomsbury, 2016; Wisden Book of the Year). Her second book, Wayfaring Stranger: A Musical Journey in the American South (W&N, Travel Book of the Year and Newsweek Book of the Decade in 2020) followed her quest to transform from classical violinist into bluegrass fiddler in the Appalachian Mountains.
While journalistic experience and rigour informs her deep research into her subjects, she enjoys long-form writing as an opportunity to write with a more personal voice, incorporating warmth and humour at the heart of her style. As an editor Emma has decades of experience working with writers at all stages of their careers, and her natural love of meeting, interviewing and working with others has led her into teaching.
She has developed and teaches workshops in writing style and narrative form for the German Institut fu r Auslandsbeziehungen, supporting their cross-cultural fellows around the world and helping them tell stories about civil society and human rights in the global South. Since 2022 she has taught and tutored student writers at the UK’s top two journalism degree courses, at Oxford Brookes and City University; she also created Oxford Brookes’s first-ever sportswriting course.
Emma’s most recent book, Self Contained: Scenes from a Single Life, was published by Octopus in 2023, and her interest in the worldwide demographic shift away from marriage led to a 2024 radio documentary, Cricket and the Maidens, for the BBC World Service. She enjoys writing for audio, and her cricket podcast for the Guardian, The Spin, won Sports Podcast of the Year in 2019. Her next book, which she is currently researching, will be on Premier League football.