Background

Naomi Wood was born in 1983 in Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom. She grew up in Yorkshire, but when Naomi was eight her family moved to Hong Kong, where she lived for ten years.

Education

Naomi studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge. She then obtained the Masters in Creative Writing and Ph.D. at the University of East Anglia.

Career

After working for Random House, Naomi wrote her first novel, The Godless Boys. This was published in the UK and Norway in 2011. Her next work was Mrs. Hemingway. Research for this book has taken Naomi as far afield as Chicago, Boston, Key West, Cuba, Antibes, and Paris. She also spent time as a resident scholar at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and was the British Library’s 2012 Eccles Centre Writer in Resident. Mrs. Hemingway had been published in fifteen countries and the TV option has been sold. It was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and was a Richard and Judy bookclub choice.

For the past few years, Wood has been working on her third novel called The Hiding Game, which takes place in the first modern art school - the Bauhaus - in Germany before the Nazis came to power. It was published in July 2019 with Picador and Hoffman und Campe in Germany, in the centenary year of the Bauhaus art school.

Wood is currently teaching Creative Writing at her alma mater, the University of East Anglia. She has taught at Goldsmiths, where she was one of the 2017 judges of the Goldsmiths Prize. She is also the Young Patrons Ambassador at the British Library.

Achievements

• Naomi Wood is a prolific author. She is best known for her bestseller Mrs. Hemingway, for which she won the Jerwood Prize.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Hiding Game

    (In 1922, Paul Beckermann arrives at the Bauhaus art schoo...)

    2019
  • The Godless Boys

    (Imagine an alternative England, where the Church controls...)

    2011
  • Mrs. Hemingway

    (It tells the story of how it was to love and be loved by,...)

    2014