About

Susanna Crossman is an award-winning Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist, published internationally in print and online. She’s currently judging the 2025 Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize.

‘Home is Where we Start’, her acclaimed memoir about her childhood in a utopian commune, is out with Fig Tree/Penguin. It is a Guardian “Book to Look Out For!” The book began with her Aeon essay ‘The Utopian Machine’, which went viral in 2022. In the Sunday Times, Home Is Where We Start was described as “serious and poetic… delicate and wise. It’s a multi-layered excavation, a rich but also careful unfolding of the truth.”

‘The Orange Notebooks’ is published by Bluemoose Books (UK) in 2025 and Assembly Press (North America). She has recent work in The Guardian, Aeon, Vogue, Paris Review, Neue Rundschau, S. Fischer, Berfrois & elsewhere. She was a 2022 Hawthornden Fellow, and her novel L’île sombre (La croisée/Editions Delcourt) was published in 2021. Winner of the 2019 LoveReading Short Story Award, she was nominated for Best of The Net Non-Fiction and is a member of the Dangerous Women project.

She regularly collaborates in international hybrid arts projects, currently, The Dinner Party Reloaded, a series of virtual gatherings with artists and writers with Lucy Writers. She co-wrote the French novel, L’Hôpital, Le dessous des Cartes (LEH, 2015).

Susanna teaches writing, mentors writers and hosts events. Outside of the book world, she works on three continents as a clinical arts therapist, speaker and lecturer (Sarah Lawrence College, NY, Université de Rennes 1, Ecole d’art-thérapie de Tours...) Her research work is published internationally.

She studied Drama at Exeter University and has Masters’ degrees from the Université de Rennes 2 and Université Francois Rabelais. Susanna lives with her partner and three daughters in France. She is represented by Jessica Craig at Craig Literary.