Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Lamorna Ash

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: London, UK
MacDowell Fellowships: 2024

Lamorna Ash is a writer, journalist and editor at Weatherglass Books. Her first book, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Nature Writing Prize in 2020, and won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2021. The book was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. As a journalist, she writes for The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Times, New Left Review’s Sidecar, Literary Review, and The Telegraph. She is also a New Statesman columnist. Her second book, an investigation into Christianity in Britain today, will be coming out with Bloomsbury in 2025.

At MacDowell, Ash completed final edits for her second book, Don't Forget We're Here Forever, out in May 2025, and started work on her third non-fiction book, tentatively titled The Possibility Love is Not Enough. For this, she spent most of her time conducting research in the James Baldwin Library, as well as interviewing several Fellows about the relationship between their art and how they think about love.

Portrait by Maria Rodenas Sainz de Baranda

Studios

Phi Beta

Lamorna Ash worked in the Phi Beta studio.

Funded by the Phi Beta Fraternity, a national professional fraternity of music and speech founded in 1912, Phi Beta Studio was built between 1929–1931 of granite quarried on the MacDowell grounds. The small studio is a simple in design, but displays a pleasing combination of materials with its granite walls and colorful slate roofing. Inside is…

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