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

I’m a feature writer and cookery book author and I have written three non-fiction books, too. In 2026, my seventeenth book will come out: a popular science book about allergies, called Irritated. Writing Irritated has been an intense but incredibly rewarding experience, involving interviews with over 40 scientists, researchers and medics all over the world, plus 20 families and individuals living with allergies themselves. The number of citations (538 – my poor copy editors) hopefully goes to show how hard I worked to make this an evidence-based and genuinely useful book, and one that people can trust.

Be Bad, Better - How Not Trying So Hard Will Set You Free is a science and evidence-based non-fiction book about why so many of the things we are taught to consider bad about ourselves are anything but, and was published in 2024.

In 2020 I published Solo: How To Work Alone (And Not Lose Your Mind). When I started writing the book in back in 2019, after a decade of trying to cope with solitary work myself, I thought I was writing it for a few freelancers and remote workers like me. But 2020 meant that the audience was suddenly bigger than I could have imagined and it swiftly became a bestseller. 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 you how to arrange your pencils). Find out more at the How To Work Alone website.

Solo is available in America, Australia and New Zealand, and has been translated into Portuguese, Turkish, 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 to thousands of people, and into a 3-season podcast called the Solo Collective, which has had over 100,000 downloads.

I am a feature writer for the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Telegraph, Times and Sunday Times, and for magazines like National Geographic, Harpers Bazaar and Living Etc. (See some of my most recent work here.) I am lucky enough to get to write about fascinating and diverse subjects, like the trouble with the menopause supplement market, digital amnesia and how smartphone use could be impacting our memories; whether coffee made with functional mushrooms lives up to the hype, the hunt for a climate-change resistant chickpea and post-pandemic mental health recovery. Before going freelance 16 years ago, I was an assistant editor at the Observer newspaper in London, working on Observer Food Monthly magazine.

I'm also the author of 14 cookbooks, most recently nine hugely successful books with the LEON restaurant group and two with the Ginger Pig butchers, all published by Octopus and available worldwide, as well as three of my own, which were published by Hardie Grant.

I have held long-running columns in the Guardian, Evening Standard and Healthy magazine, and worked for five years
as a freelance magazine editor for Soho House & Co. I was a weekly presenter on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch for four years and I’m an experienced broadcaster. I regularly appear on BBC and commercial radio, as well as on podcasts.