‘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 is founder of The Selkie Press and editor of Wild Woman Swimming by Lynne Roper – a journal of west country waters longlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, she is also a sought-after artist in residence who encourages connection and creativity in those who encounter her.
In 2016 Tanya embarked on her Wild Patience Scrolls – a mile of writing composed outdoors, pen on paper, undertaken beside the country’s oldest lido and completed by Lake Geneva as guest of the European publisher Vera Michalski Hoffmann at The Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature. It asked the hundreds who came close: When did you feel most wild and free?
“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.” David Nash RA
She has since worked with the public in many other extraordinary locations, including 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 as writer-in-residence at the 2019 Wealden Literary Festival.
A regular contributor to Oh Comely, her writing has also appeared in The Guardian, Rakes Progress and The Simple Things. With Fi Glover, she co-presented the three-hour Radio 4 Extra special People Talking, and was featured alongside her mentor the sculptor David Nash in the 2018 BBC Radio 4 show Pursuit of Beauty: Slow Art.
Her debut non-fiction book The Cure for Sleep will be published in early 2022 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
“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)
