Katherine Angel

Photo: Liz Seabrook

I am the author of three works of literary non-fiction, Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin, FSG, 2012), Daddy Issues (Peninsula Press, Verso, 2019), and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (Verso, 2021).

My next book, Poor Freud, is forthcoming in 2027 with Verso (UK) and Norton (US).

My books have been translated into a dozen languages, and have been reviewed and featured in a wide range of publications nationally and internationally, including The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, and others. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again has been described as ‘one of the smartest, most thoughtful and nuanced books about sex in the post-MeToo era’.

I am regularly invited to give readings, talks, and keynotes in the UK and abroad, at universities, public spaces, literary festivals, as well as appearing in broadcast media and podcasts. I have written essays and reviews for The Guardian, Granta, Frieze, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Aeon.

Before taking up senior lectureships in English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck (where I directed the MA in Creative and Critical Writing), and then Queen Mary, University of London (where I also held a fellowship in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences), I had a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at Warwick University’s Centre for the History of Medicine, and a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. I also teach courses at Faber Academy.

I am a practising psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. Mentoring is not analysis or therapy, but all my work is informed by a deep commitment to the transformative powers of speaking and listening, and by the knowledge that a curious exploration of stasis or confusion can be generative and enlivening.

I work with writers on a range of nonfiction projects, including essay, memoir and autotheory as well as more argument-based work. I am particularly experienced in:

• writing that weaves together memoir with larger theoretical and philosophical questions

• work engaging with psychoanalysis, sexuality, and feminism

• writing that is concerned with the interplay between form and content

• work that does not shy away from difficult theoretical questions, or tricky and sensitive material

Nonfiction is a broad and capacious church, and I am overall interested in writing that has a strong sense of its own identity and voice, and which explores often complex ideas.