Rachel Hewitt | |
---|---|
Born | Rachel Hewitt |
Spouse | |
Awards | Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction, Eccles British Library Writer's Award |
Academic background | |
Education | Corpus Christi College, Oxford (MA), Queen Mary University, London, (PhD) |
Thesis | Dreaming o'er the Map of Things: The Ordnance Survey and Literature of the British Isles, 1747-1842 (2007) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | English literature |
Institutions | Newcastle University |
Notable works | Map of a Nation (2010) A Revolution of Feeling (2017) In Her Nature (2023) |
Website | rachelhewitt |
Rachel Hewitt is a writer of creative non-fiction,and was a lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University until 2023. [1]
Hewitt attended the University of Oxford,where she studied English Literature at Corpus Christi College for a BA and M.St. She completed a PhD in 2007 in English literature at Queen Mary University,London,with a thesis on romanticism and mapping titled Dreaming o'er the Map of Things:The Ordnance Survey and Literature of the British Isles,1747-1842. [2] [3] In 2009,she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship,to the Department of English and Drama at Queen Mary. [4]
Hewitt's first book Map of a Nation:A Biography of the Ordnance Survey was published in 2010 by Granta, [5] and built on her PhD thesis work. Hewitt was awarded a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction for this project. [6] In 2011,Hewitt was announced as one of ten BBC Radio 3 AHRC New Generation Thinkers. [7] [8]
Her second book A Revolution of Feeling:The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind was published by Granta in 2017, [9] and explores the decade of the 1790s through the biographies of five people:poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge,philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin,medic Thomas Beddoes,and photographer Thomas Wedgwood. [10] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. [11] [12]
In April 2023,she published In Her Nature:How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors,a book which explores the histories of women's participation in sport and the 'great outdoors',interwoven with a personal memoir about loss. [13] [14] Hewitt was awarded an Eccles British Library Writer's Award in 2018 for this project. [15]
Hewitt has three daughters, and lives in Yorkshire. [20] She was married to Pete Newbon, a lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature at Northumbria University in Newcastle, who died in January 2022. [21] She is a keen runner and has been running since her mid-20s. [22]