Marianne Brooker is a British author and academic known for her work on literature, care and social justice. Her most recent work, Intervals (2024), explores personal and social history, combining memoir, polemic and feminist philosophy. She is the winner of the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. Her work was on the longlist for the 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction.
Brooker was born and raised in Essex and Devon. She was the first in her family to attend university, earning a BA and MPhil in English from the University of Cambridge. She completed a PhD in English Literature from Birkbeck, University of London.
Her academic research focuses on nineteenth-century poetry collections, encyclopaedias, colour charts, and museum archives as sites of 'fugitive knowledge.' Brooker has presented her research at conferences convened by prestigious institutions such as the University of Oxford, the University of York, Freie Universität Berlin, Paris Sorbonne, Princeton University, and Stockholm University.
In 2020, she co-edited a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on Sibylline leaves, exploring literary fragments, mediation, and prophecy.
Brooker began her career in local media and was formerly co-editor of The Ecologist, a climate justice news website. She has also worked as a copyeditor for academic journals, news outlets, and publishers. Her diverse roles have included bartender, bookseller, waiter, tutor, shelf-stacker, and footnoter-for-hire.
In 2022, Brooker won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Intervals. The book, published in February 2024, describes living with her mother at the end of her life, exploring themes of choice, care, and creativity under austerity. As part of the prize, Brooker spent five weeks as a writer-in-residence at Mahler & Lewitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, creating a pamphlet titled Inventive Forms of Love.
In Intervals, Brooker weaves her personal and final memories with a study of doulas, living wills, and the precarious economics of social, hospice, and funeral care. She reflects on her mother's battle with primary progressive multiple sclerosis and her decision to hasten her death in 2019. "Being dead was no great fear of hers, but being compelled to live was killing her," Brooker writes, capturing the essence of her mother's struggle.
Brooker is also interested in craft, feminist and abolitionist approaches to care and the connections between nature, storytelling, and social transformation. Her journalistic contributions have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, and other publications. She has hosted live radio on BBC Radio 5Live and has been featured on various international radio stations.
Marianne Brooker lives in Bristol. Currently, she works at Platform, a charity campaigning for climate and social justice.
Photo credit: Alexander Burton
