Writing for your life

Amanda Smyth is Irish Trinidadian, and author of three novels. Her first novel, Black Rock, won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger, was nominated for an NAACP award, short listed for the McKitterick Prize and selected as an Oprah Winfrey Summer Read. Black Rock was chosen as one of Waterstones New Voices, and translated into many languages.

Her second novel, A Kind of Eden, set in contemporary Trinidad, was optioned for TV (2024) by Ringside. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in New Writing, London Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Fortune, her third novel, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Amanda is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford. Look at You, her new novel, will be published in February 2025.