I am a writer and academic. My fiction explores, amongst other things, weird landscapes, concentric objects, compulsive fainting, pregnancy, skin, crocuses, environmental contamination. My academic work focuses on the literary history of swooning and on contemporary fiction, especially in relation to depictions of the environment and the body.

I completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex, and researched literary swooning, which inspired my first work of fiction, The Lost Art of Sinking (2015). This was selected for New Writing North’s Read Regional campaign 2017 and won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella. My first novel, Sealed, is a work of eco-horror, which was shortlisted for the Not the Booker Award 2018. My second novel, Exit Management, moves between contemporary London and Dewsbury, and 1940s Budapest, and was a Guardian Fiction Book of the year in 2020. My first love is short fiction, and my stories have been long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, and anthologised in Best British Short Stories 2019. I’ve recently re-written the Yorkshire folktale of the boggart for the Audible Original and Virago collection, Hag, and my debut short story collection, Animals at Night, publishes soon.

I am an experienced creative writing lecturer, examiner, mentor and prize judge. I previously lectured in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Sussex and York St John University, where I was Subject Director for Creative Writing and worked with colleagues within the York Centre of Writing.  I am now Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University.

I have spent most of my life in Yorkshire: I was born in Bradford, grew up in Dewsbury, and now live in York.

Contact

Email: Naomi.R.Booth@gmail.com

Agent: Sabhbh Curran, Sabhbh.Curran@curtisbrown.co.uk

Follow

Twitter: @NaomiBooth

Published by Dead Ink Books June 2022 (buy Animals at Night here)

‘A master of the short story … This collection is stunning.’ — Lucie McKnight Hardy

A woman feeding a baby late at night listens to the animal sounds in the city around her. A grieving widow encounters an injured jellyfish on a deserted beach. A young woman can’t shake the image of dying hare she finds at the side of the road. A dairy farmer hears her herd bellow with fear at night.

Animals at Night is Naomi Booth’s first collection of short stories. Collected here are stories that illuminate the strange nocturnal meetings between humans and other animals.

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A Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2020

‘Exit Management is an essential novel for our times. It fizzes with anxiety and desperate characters; building to a chokeholdof thrilling tension. A joy from the first page to the last, all told in exhilaratingly exquisite prose.’– Lara Williams, author of Supper Club

‘Exit Management tells the story of three souls cast adrift in an uncaring world and the redemptive power of art, friendship and love. Naomi Booth renders her entirely believable characters in hauntingly poetic prose that is as beautiful as it is tragic. A major, highly original talent.’– Cathi Unsworth, author of Weirdo

‘A stunning exploration of the human urge to love, protect and remember, and an empathetic study of lost souls driven to connect. Written in poetic and haunting prose, Exit Management pierces the dark heart of society, letting in the light.’– Megan Bradbury, author of Everyone is Watching

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Shortlisted for the Guardian “Not the Booker” Award 2018

‘[A]n accomplished, slow-burning meditation on motherhood, pregnancy and love … The tense, gut-wrenching climax is a masterclass in sustained descriptive imagery: though it’s not for the faint-hearted, and expectant mothers might choose to steer clear, Sealed is a marvellous first novel.‘–The Guardian

‘Sealed is a harrowing, engaging, moving and deeply thoughtful text about motherhood, anxiety, conservation and romantic relationships: in short, it’s an absolute belter and exactly the kind of unique fiction that indie presses should be proud to publish. ’— Open Pen

‘[A] brilliant dystopian distillation of just about all the ecological fears a young parent can suffer from.’–The White Review, Books of the Year 2017

‘There is an unbearable truth about the modern world to be found in this book… What a delicate, provoking balance of apocalyptic vision and personal journey Sealed is. I loved it.’ –Aliya Whiteley, The Arrival of Missives

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Shortlisted for the MMU Novella Award 2014
Winner of the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2016
Selected for New Writing North: Read Regional 2017

Beautifully written with bursts of crisp poetic monologue and deadpan humour, the novella shows unusual talent. Naomi Booth is a name to watch.– Prospect Magazine

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Short Fiction

‘Sour Hall’

Published by Virago (2020) and Audible Original (2019) (Buy HAG here)

Forgotten folktales, retold.

‘A thoroughly original package that has a hint of Angela Carter’ The Times

‘Sharp writing and cleverly done’ Spectator

 

Northern Short Story Festival reading (Sunday June 3, 2019)

Liverpool Light Night, Creative Rituals, public talk with Luke Bird and Dead Ink Books (Friday May 17, 2019)

Big City Read, Deadly Fictions workshop, November 8th, 2018

Northern Fiction Alliance Roadshow, Tottenham Court Road Waterstone’s, October 1, 2018

Abi Curtis in conversation with Naomi Booth, Kensington Waterstone’s, May 3, 2018

Launch event for the York Literary Festival and the York Centre for Writing, York St John University, March 15, 2018

Fictions of Every Kind, Leeds, April 2018

Launch event: Sealed and Water and Glass, November 30th, Waterstones, York

The Dystopian Novel: Plenary presentation of Sealed, York Centre for Writing at NAWE 2017, Saturday November 11th (York)

Northern Fiction Alliance Roadshow, Waterstones, Manchester – Tuesday 26th September 2017, reviewed in Disclaimer Mag and Northern Soul

New Writing North Read Regional events – April to June 2017

• Monkseaton Library, Whitley Bay – Tuesday 20th June 2017
• Penrith Library, St. Andrews Churchyard, Penrith – Monday 12th June 2017
• Darwen Library, Darwen – Wednesday 7th June 2017
• Doncaster Central Lending Library, Doncaster – Thursday 18th May 2017
• Lindley Library, Huddersfield – Tuesday 9th May 2017
• Denby Dale Library, Huddersfield – Tuesday 9th May 2017
• Sunderland Museum & Winter Garden, Burdon Road, Sunderland – Thursday 6th April 2017

‘In this absorbing study Booth argues that being out for the count – eyes closed, ears deaf, pulse thready – functions as telling testimony in a range of narratives from Troilus and Criseyde to Fifty Shades of Grey by way of Dracula.‘ Kathryn Hughes, TLS

Articles

“Dark Ecology and Queer Amphibious Vampires.” UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies. Special issue, “From Queer/Nature to Queer Ecologies: Celebrating twenty years of scholarship and creativity” 19 (2015) 51-59

“The Felicity of Falling: Fifty Shades of Grey and the Feminine Art of Sinking.” Women: A Cultural Review 26(1-2) (2015) 22-39

“Restricted View: The Problem of Perspective in the Novels of Ian McEwan.” Textual Practice 29(5) (2015) 845-868

“Bathetic Masochism and the Shrinking Woman.” New Formations 83 (2014) 47-64

“Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)Sensible Woman.” Women’s Writing 21(4) (2014) 575-591

 Book Chapters

“Good Vibrations: Shaken Subjects and the Disintegrative Romance Heroine.” Women and Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres. Ed. Kristen Phillips (McFarland, 2015)

Journalism & Press Interviews

“Weird landscapes: A quintet” for DeadInkBooks.com, 3rd August 2017

“Swoon! The cultural history of an ecstatic phenomenon” in Prospect Magazine, 25th June 2015

“The top 10 literary swoons” in The Guardian, 19th June 2015

Interview with Ian Macmillan, The Verb, BBC Radio 3, 6th June 2015

“Giddy heights of research translate into fiction”: Interview with Times Higher Education, 4th June 2015