Welcome…
I’m Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep: my story of waking up, breaking free and making a more creative life – even as I remained a wife and mother in a small town.
If you’ve found me here after reading the book – or you’re new to my work and have followed me on a friend’s recommendation – then I hope these resources and projects will interest you to explore, perhaps becoming part of your own creative journey…
A Waterstones Non-Fiction book for 2022
“A sublimely written account of refusing to be defined by social constructs and embracing life-enhancing change, The Cure for Sleep is a poignant and inspiring slice of literary memoir.”
Buy the book
What happens when you realise that you must change your life?
When – after years of hiding in routine, shrinking from opportunity, and sleepwalking through your days – you know you want more.
How do you remake your life without breaking it?
Paperback | Audiobook | Kindle
“Shadrick wrote The Cure for Sleep to chart her reinvention from shy, small-town outsider to someone stamping their presence on artistic and literary life…and she wants to help others follow in her footsteps.”
The Ipaper
Podcasts, radio & film
Listen to Tanya in conversation with fellow authors and artists – including Sharon Blackie, Katherine May, Melissa Febos, David Nash & more
Tanya Shadrick: “Apprenticeships were always seven years: why not place yourself in service to your dream or ambition for that long, using every spare minute on it. Ask yourself: What would you begin now and persist with if you were guaranteed 10 or 20 years in which to master it?”
BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour
Interviews, essays & articles
Read Tanya’s words for Waterstones, BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, Little Toller, The Simple Things, Ernest Journal & others
“Shadrick is a thoughtful, poetically articulate interviewee. Her vantage point is one that she tells expressively in her debut book, The Cure for Sleep. It’s ambitious in its scope, a memoir telling her journey from rural working-class Devon to where she is today.
The Telegraph
Tanya Shadrick’s memoir of a late-waking life describes the transformation that the author underwent after recovering from near-death. Both a celebration of life’s second chances and a profound reflection on the emotional straitjackets that society forces people into, The Cure for Sleep is powered by a deep love of literature. In this exclusive piece, Tanya recalls how the ‘fairy-tale logic’ of her childhood reading informed the direction that her life took and recommends works that mine folklore and mythology in pursuit of a more immediate form of living…
Tanya Shadrick for Waterstones: Using Bedtime Stories as an Adult Call to Adventure
“Absorbing…robust, declarative even, but there is also something disquieting in this memoir… for Shadrick, to be a woman, an artist and a mother still seems something not quite of this world: a fairy tale that puzzles her even though – or perhaps because – it came true.”
the TLS
Wild Patience Scrolls
a mile of writing composed pen on paper on 5 x 150ft scrolls, inviting onlookers to describe when they felt most wild and free
supported by Pells Pool, Lewes, and the Jan Michalski Foundation, Switzerland
as featured by Radio 4, Oh Comely and the Outdoor Swimming Society
Concentrates of Place
a rest-of-life project begun by artist Tanya Shadrick after sudden near-death
as featured by National Geographic Education, Ernest Journal and The Simple Things
Birds of Firle
a single edition book being posted in sequence to one hundred collaborators across a decade, inviting responses on grief & hope as the things with feathers
as featured by Little Toller’s The Clearing
Wild Woman Swimming
a journal of west country waters
by Lynne Roper
edited by Tanya Shadrick
longlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize
The Selkie Press
small publisher with a big commitment to stories of community & connection
founded by Tanya Shadrick
home to Wild Woman Swimming, Birds of Firle & Selkie Press Stories
Gallery
places, people, projects
seven years in public
a late apprenticeship
to creativity and connection
“Tender…ferocious…This luminous debut charts how the author pledged to radically change her life after nearly dying following the birth of her first child”
THE IPapER
“The Cure for Sleep is a brilliant exploration of one woman’s driving need to punch through the constraints society puts upon her . . . This is a passionate hymn to the need to nurture the creative life inside of you”
waterstones bookseller
Tanya Shadrick 