Dr Louise Foxcroft

After a rackety start at art college, dropping out, hitching around America, and having two baby boys by the time I was twenty-three, I read History at the University of Cambridge. I published my PhD thesis as The Making of Addiction: The use and abuse of opium in nineteenth-century Britain (Ashgate, 2007). My second book, Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A history of the modern menopause (Granta, 2009), won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award 2009, and was commended by the Medical Journalists Association in the Open General Readership Book Award 2010. Calories and Corsets: A history of dieting over 2,000 years (Profile, 2012) was shortlisted for a Food Writers Guild book prize in 2013. Sexuality: All That Matters (2014) is part of the Hodder & Stoughton series.  The Serpentine, Or, The Attractions of Water was published by Honeybee Books in 2015, followed by Gayer-Anderson: The Life and Afterlife of the Irish Pasha (American University in Cairo Press, 2016). I was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Magdalene College (2015-17).
I write only on subjects that stir my soul and believe that history frames our existence. All this and more can be brought to life through creative non-fiction. This forms much of the basis of my teaching. I want to encourage striving authors and perhaps help to progress their projects into polished, publishable works.