I’m a writer, a contributing editor of the Yale Review and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, which was a finalist for the 2023 National Award for Arts Writing. I’ve written for the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Nation, the New Republic, Bookforum, Granta, the Paris Review online, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Observer and the Sunday Times. I was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2024. I live in New York City.

After working at the London Review of Books for fifteen years, I was a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine from 2021 to 2024. While at Harper’s, two pieces I edited, by Ian Penman and Rosalind Brown, were nominated for 2025 National Magazine Awards, in the Reviews and Criticism and Fiction categories. Two stories I edited at The Yale Review, by László Krasznahorkai and Sigrid Nunez, won the 2026 National Magazine Award for Fiction.

I was a recipient of a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation in 2020, and part of the inaugural cohort at the Willa Cather Writers’ Residency in Red Cloud, Nebraska in 2023. I was nominated to the National Book Critics’ Circle board in 2026, and have been a fellow of Grace Hopper College, Yale University since 2025. In June 2026, I was elected a fellow of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature.

In 2017, I co-founded Silver Press to publish feminist writers, including Audre Lorde, Leonora Carrington, Nell Dunn, Chantal Akerman and M. NourbeSe Philip. My first book, All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, came out in 2015 with Serpent’s Tail in the UK.

In 2026-27, I will be a lecturer at Yale University, where I will teach public criticism and creative writing.

You can email me at joanna.biggs@gmail.com, follow me on Twitter @JoannaBiggs or on Instagram @joanouvelle