‘Tanya Shadrick…is an electrifying new voice and her book has the quality of a fable that teaches us how to live, how to step out of the confines we have made for ourselves, how to wake up.” Lettice Franklin, Editorial Director at Weidenfeld & Nicolson on The Cure for Sleep
Tanya Shadrick’s first book The Cure for Sleep – the story of a late-waking life – will be published in early 2022 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
As founder of The Selkie Press, she is editor of Wild Woman Swimming – a journal of west country waters longlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize: a book created following just a single meeting with its dying author, Lynne Roper.
Tanya is also a sought-after artist in residence who encourages connection and creativity in those who encounter her. In 2016, she began her Wild Patience Scrolls – a mile of writing composed outdoors, pen on paper, beside the country’s oldest lido and completed near Lake Geneva with support from The Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature.
She has since worked with the public in other extraordinary locations that include Virginia Woolf’s garden on the Sussex Downs, a listed National Trust cabin on a cliffside by the wild west country sea, and Boldshaves Garden (where she was the 2019 writer-in-residence for Wealden Literary Festival.)
Her short-form writing has appeared in many publications – including The Guardian and Little Toller’s online journal The Clearing – and she was featured alongside her mentor the sculptor David Nash in the 2018 BBC Radio 4 show Pursuit of Beauty: Slow Art.
After a childhood on the outskirts of a small market town near the North Devon and Cornwall coast, Tanya has lived for the last twenty-five years on the Sussex Downs – surrounded by the landscape and light which also made the area a settling place for writer Virginia Woolf and artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Eric Ravilious.
“Tanya creates intriguing space in public places where the curious find themselves engaging in a writer’s practice and volunteering their own stories to be woven into her work.” Sculptor David Nash RA
“In Tanya’s words one can feel the sense of personal ownership and self-sufficiency…Nobody rules you, nothing has ruined you, you are gleefully, determinedly, yourself.” Jenny Landreth writing in Swell (Bloomsbury, 2017)
