Tanya Shadrick
Tanya Shadrick is a British writer whose work explores the tension between restraint and risk: how we negotiate duty and desire.
“Robust, declarative even, but there is also something disquieting… for Shadrick, to be a woman, an artist and a mother still seems something not quite of this world.” TLS
Tanya embarked as a writer after forty with THE WILD PATIENCE SCROLLS – a mile of writing composed pen on paper beside England’s oldest outdoor pool. Conducted across two years, it placed her in direct encounter with many thousands of people: a radical extension of her previous private practice as a hospice life-story scribe and a deliberate experiment in bringing literary and existential conversations into the local everyday.
Following this project, Tanya was welcomed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and as writer-in-residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland, the National Trust artists’ cabin at Bucks Mills, and Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House.
Her debut book THE CURE FOR SLEEP (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is a memoir that explores the limits of personal freedom within small-town life: what it takes and costs to expand the possible. It was a Waterstones and Evening Standard non-fiction book of the year.
Since 2024, she has returned to working privately, after completing an intensive decade-long period of public-facing projects. She is currently at work on a novel.
She has lived for the last thirty years in Lewes on the Sussex Downs.
Find Tanya on Instagram