SUSANNA CROSSMAN is British but has been based in France for nearly half her life. She has work featured in Aeon, Paris Review, Firmament and Berfrois. She also has written for Riggwelter Press (her essay The Nomenclature of a Toddler was nominated for Best of the Net in Creative Non-fiction 2018), Litro, 3AM Magazine, and Visual Verse. She is winner of the Lovereading Short Story Award 2019. She is a contributor to anthologies We'll Never Have Paris edited by Andrew Gallix (Repeater Books, 2019), Trauma (Dodo Ink, 2020), Thousand: An Anthology of Very Short Fiction edited by Leonora Craig Cohen (Brainchild, 2017), and she has been published in Neue Rundschau (S. Fischer Verlage). She hosts a regular feature, The Dinner Party Reloaded, interviewing writers for Lucy Writers Platform a showcase for works of women and non-binary writers and creatives. She studied Drama at Exeter University and has Masters' degrees from the Université de Rennes 2 and Université Francois Rabelais. She has worked on three continents, as a drama-therapist and lecturer (Sarah Lawrence College, NY, Université de Rennes 1, Ecole d'art-thérapie de Tours) specialising in mental health and non-verbal communication. She writes in both English and French and her research work is published in France, Korea and Germany. For Autumn 2022 Susanna was accepted for a Fellowship at Hawthornden Literary Retreat. She lives in Brittany with her partner and three daughters. Her first novel, Dark Island, is published in French with La Croisée/Grupe Delcourt, 2021, as L'île Sombre, translation by Carine Chichereau.
After her personal essay, The Utopian Machine, was published in Aeon magazine, World English rights (excluding North America) sold to the Fig Tree imprint of Penguin Random House UK. This will be a nonfiction account of childhood in commune, blending philosophy, sociology and ethics and a wider story about inheritance and identity and why we become what we become.
REVIEWS:
Gladys Marivat, Monde des Livres "In the changing waters of memory… Susanna Crossman navigates between cosy mystery and Gothic novel, in a spooky debut book on the class struggle… Nothing is stable in Susanna Crossman's novel, like the sea whose colour changes from blue to green, from grey to brown, the moods of the characters jolt and tremble."
Julie Malaure, Le Point "We follow this story, both playful and disturbing, led by an Englishwoman living in Brittany…"
Alice Monéger, Alibi Magazine "Served by a precise and sharp language, this first novel delivers a fairly revealing portrait of English society, between disillusions, excesses and withdrawal into oneself. An author to follow, without a doubt."
RECENT WORK:
Aeon, The Play Cure
MAI, Fieldnotes From La Maternité
Paris Review The Only Believers
Berfrois Edie Bakes Cakes short story, selected as Longform Fiction Pick of the Week (20 April 2020)
Read interview and prize-winning story, Oh, I Do Love a Banana and listen to the story read by actress Rebecca Peyton and Susanna discussing her literary life with acclaimed writer and editor Elena Lappin on the Lovereading Podcast
Berfrois A Year Of Yellow Edges
Burning House Press By the Water's Edge
Burning House Press Faith Is an Egg With a Thin Shell
Burning House Press Douze – Twelve Stakes from these Dark Ages
Versopolis Give Me Life: The Camille Claudel Project
Riggwelter Press The Nomenclature of a Toddler, nominated for Best of the Net in Creative Non-fiction
Litro Wild Thing, Or The Law Of Superposition
3AM Magazine poem brut #26 – the diverse colors of needlework
The Stockholm Review of Literature The Ruin
Queens Mob Not My Writing Desk
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