I write about the things which make us human: work, family, food and health.

In December 2023, I published my fourteenth book, Be Bad, Better - How Not Trying So Hard Will Set You Free (Souvenir Press), a science and evidence-based book about why so many of the things we are taught to consider bad about ourselves are anything but. In it, I examine why laziness, mess and clutter can be good for us, why sadness, anger and regret are essential emotions, why we don’t always need to be pursue happiness and why our bodies – and our faces – have always been, and always will be, fine just the way they are. It includes interviews with over 40 experts and thinkers, including Daniel Pink, Caitlin Moran, Virginia Sole-Smith, Helen Russell, Will Storr, Stephanie Yeboah, Shahroo Izadi and Oliver Burkeman, plus data from hundreds of studies.

In 2020 I published ‘SOLO - How To Work Alone (And Not Lose Your Mind), which swiftly became a bestseller. In 2019, when I started writing SOLO, after a decade of trying to cope with solitary work myself, I thought I was writing a book for freelancers and a few remote workers. But 2020 changed the way we work forever, and it turned out that the audience was bigger than I could have imagined. SOLO is also an evidence-based book, with expert interviewees from the worlds of behavioural science, organisational psychology and economics, as well as other solo workers - it’s not just me telling people how to arrange their pencils. Find out more about SOLO at the How To Work Alone website. SOLO is available in America, Australia and New Zealand, and has been translated into Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarian, Romanian, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese. I turned what I learned writing SOLO into a workshop for anyone who works alone, which I have now delivered, online and in person, to thousands of people, and into a three-season podcast series called the Solo Collective.

I am a feature writer for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, the Financial Times, the Telegraph and National Geographic, as well as for many other glossy magazines and broadsheet newspapers. (Find some of my most recent work here.) I am extremely lucky that the topics I get to cover are very diverse, including digital amnesia and how smartphone use could be impacting our memories; chickpeas and climate change; and post-pandemic mental health recovery.

Before going freelance 12 years ago, I was a contributing editor at the Observer newspaper, in London.

I'm the author of 12 cookbooks, most recently eight hugely successful books with the LEON restaurant group and one with the Ginger Pig butchers, all published by Octopus and available worldwide, as well as three on my own, published by Hardie Grant.

I have had long-running columns in national newspapers and magazines, and worked for five years as a freelance magazine editor for Soho House & Co.

For five years, I was a weekly presenter on Sunday Brunch, a TV show on Channel 4. I’m an experienced broadcaster and regularly appear on BBC and commercial radio, as well as podcasts.

Please email me about commissions or new projects.