Marianne Brooker at House of Books & Friends

Marianne Brooker will be at House of Books & Friends to discuss her new book, Intervals, published by Fitzcarraldo and longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

In 2022, Marianne Brooker won the annual Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Intervals, her first book. The prize aims to find the best emerging essay writers and to give them a chance to develop and showcase their talent (it’s currently open to submissions until 17 March if you’re interested in giving it a go!). As part of the prize, she spent five weeks as a writer-in-residence at Mahler & Lewitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, where she produced a pamphlet titled ‘Inventive Forms of Love’.

Intervals brings together personal and social history, in which Brooker describes living with her mum at the end of her life, exploring questions of choice, care and creativity under austerity. In this moving blend of memoir, literary essay and feminist polemic, Brooker raises essential questions about choice and interdependence and, ultimately, to imagine care otherwise. Intervals is an intimate exploration of how the personal is the political and an expansive study of what it means to care for another.

Brooker grew up in Essex and Devon and is now based in Bristol. She studied English at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. Her academic research explored nineteenth-century poetry collections, encyclopaedias, colour charts and museum archives, and her interest in craft of all kinds, feminist and abolitionist approaches to care, and the connections between nature, storytelling and social transformation feed into her writing. She has worked as a copyeditor for academic journals, news outlets and publishers.

The event will include a conversation with Marianne Brooker and a Q&A, before an opportunity to get your books signed.