Rachel Seiffert

Rachel Seiffert has published four novels, A Boy in Winter, The Dark Room, Afterwards, and The Walk Home, and one collection of short stories, Field Study. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and longlisted three times for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, most recently in 2018. In 2003, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists; in 2011 she received the E. M. Forster award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and, last year, the US Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book Award.

While Rachel Seiffert has taught creative writing at postgraduate level for almost two decades – working as a guest tutor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Spalding College in the US, and Goldsmiths College in London, amongst others – in recent years most of her teaching has been in state schools. She has been writer in residence at two London secondaries for First Story, the national writing charity which works to nurture young people’s creativity, particularly in areas of deprivation and disadvantage, and Seiffert has also worked at a primary in SE26 for eight years, developing and delivering writing sessions, and training and mentoring teachers new to the classroom.

When not teaching or writing, Rachel Seiffert is most often found walking her dog, gardening, or knitting. She is doing a lot of the latter at the moment, as it helps the thinking process, and she’s in the early stages of her next novel, set in London and the Caribbean in the seventeenth century.