Jade Cuttle

Jade Cuttle is an academic and journalist. She writes a monthly book column for the Observer after previously working as Arts Commissioning Editor at The Times. As a BBC New Generation Thinker 2024-25, she writes and presents shows like Digging for Words on Radio 3 and features on Woman’s Hour, Front Row, and The Verb.

Her novel Silted Hearts conveys her muddy passion for historical reenacting, being one of Britain’s first mixed-black female warriors trained in sword, spear and axe combat. The book reimagines the forgotten 9th-century Viking raids across Africa through the magic of romantic-fantasy, witchcraft and deep connections to the natural world. What was it like to be dark in the dark ages, she asks? Where did the enslaved find light?

Her non-fiction is a love letter to the brown landscapes we loathe. It explores soil-self connections and the idea of thinking brownly with a ‘mossary’ of new nature words at the end. Both books-in-progress reflect her AHRC-funded PhD on black nature poetry, supervised by Robert Macfarlane at the University of Cambridge.

She’s an award-winning poet and singer-songwriter of Algal Bloom, an album of nature-inspired poem-songs, and has won a Northern Writers’ Award, Future Worlds Prize-shortlisting, Bridport Prize longlisting and Arts Council Funding.

Jade was part of the 2024/25 cohort of A Writing Chance, on the Faber strand.