Joanna Biggs

Joanna Biggs a writer, editor and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, which was a finalist for the 2023 National Award for Arts Writing. Her essays and criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Nation, the New Republic, Bookforum, Granta, the Paris Review online, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Observer and the Sunday Times. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2024.

After working at the London Review of Books for fifteen years, she was a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine from 2021 to 2024. While at Harper’s, two pieces she edited, by Ian Penman and Rosalind Brown, were nominated for 2025 National Magazine Awards, in the Reviews and Criticism and Fiction categories. In 2024 she became deputy editor of The Yale Review, where she is now a contributing editor. Two stories she edited, by László Krasznahorkai and Sigrid Nunez, won the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2026.

She was a recipient of a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation in 2020, and part of the inaugural cohort at the Willa Cather Writers’ Residency in Red Cloud, Nebraska in 2023. She was nominated to the National Book Critics’ Circle board in 2026, has been a fellow of Grace Hopper College, Yale University since 2025, and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2026. In 2017, she co-founded Silver Press to publish feminist writers, including Audre Lorde, Leonora Carrington, Nell Dunn, Chantal Akerman and M. NourbeSe Philip. Her first book, All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, came out in 2015 with Serpent’s Tail in the UK, and was serialized on Radio 4 as a “Book of the Week.” 

A graduate of Oxford University, she will be teaching classes on public writing at Yale.

updated July 2026