Joanna Biggs

I’m a writer and a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine.

Books

A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again

Read an edited extract from the opening of the book here

Hear me talking about the book on the LARB Radio Hour here

Finalist for the 2023 National Award for Arts Writing / Marfield Prize

‘A meditation, by turns glorious and aching, on what it means to be a woman and to try to be free’ (Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex)

‘Written with profound sensitivity and a singular eye for detail, this book is engrossing, surprising, and moving reading for anyone interested in what it means to write—and to live.’ (Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts)

‘To make sense of and find a shape to one’s life within the context of one’s literary predecessors is the project of Biggs’s brilliant book, which combines incisive biographies with a personal story of starting over. This book reframed my own life in the most startling and revealing ways, illuminating complicated desires and lifelong debates via the absorbing stories of nine women authors who I now consider sisters, teachers, kin. A deeply moving meditation on reading and writing, friendship, desire, the life of the mind, and the woman writer's perennial yearning to be free.’ (Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch)

‘Joanna Biggs is an unmissable writer. She gives new scope and fresh meaning to the idea of literary empathy.’ (Andrew O’Hagan, author of Mayflies)

‘Joanna Biggs is one of our sharpest critics and wisest interrogators of how to live. This is a deeply moving and invigorating book.’ (Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting)

Buy it in the US from your local indie or Bookshop.org

Buy it in the UK from your local indie or Bookshop.org

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work

‘Detailed, quirky and faithful in its likeness, yet underneath [it] simmers with an artist’s rage at the unfairness of it all . . . an intelligent, surprising and elegantly written book.’ (Lucy Kellaway in the FT)

‘Biggs has a lovely calm, measured style, with just a hint of menace behind it – like a tour guide in a stately home who suddenly pulls out a baseball bat and holds it there, smiling.’ (Julie Burchill in the Spectator)