Annabel Abbs is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, The Joyce Girl, was published in 2016 to great acclaim and translated into ten languages. It tells the fictionalised story of Lucia Joyce, forgotten daughter of James Joyce, and is currently being adapted for the stage. Her second novel, Frieda, was published in 2018 and immediately became a Times Book of the Month and then a Times Book of the Year, as well as featuring on BBC Woman’s Hour, and in Tatler, Good Housekeeping, Red and all the national newspapers. Translated into six languages, it tells the dramatic story of Frieda von Richthofen, the woman who inspired D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley, and later became his wife.
Abbs’s first co-authored work of non-fiction, The Age-Well Project, was published in 2019 under the name Annabel Streets. It explores the latest science of longevity and is based on her long-running blog of the same name. Her first sole-authored nonfiction book, Windswept: Walking in the Footsteps of Remarkable Women marks her first foray into memoir and biography. Acquired at auction by Two Roads (an imprint of John Murray) in the UK, Tin House in the US, Harper Collins in Germany and publishers in France, Holland and Italy, Windswept is a feminist exploration of walking in wild landscapes. Here Abbs examines the role of non-urban walking on the lives, writings and art of several women including Gwen John, Frieda Lawrence, Nan Shepherd, Georgia O’Keeffe and Simone de Beauvoir, alongside a good smattering of audacious but entirely forgotten women. As she walks their paths – the empty plains of Texas, the mountains of Scotland, the rivers and forests of France – Abbs looks back at her own walking childhood in remote Wales and asks why wild spaces have been denied to women and why women have been overlooked in the ‘literature of the leg’ and the canon of nature writing.
