A short life of the author
Daisy Johnson (b. 1990) was born in the English Midlands. She studied English at Lancaster University and creative writing at Oxford.
Life and Career
Fen (2016) — a story collection set in the Fens of East Anglia, in which landscape is animate, predatory, and haunted — won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and announced a writer of extraordinary atmospheric power. The stories are folk horror: women turn into eels, houses consume their inhabitants, the land itself is a character.
Everything Under (2018) — a retelling of the Oedipus myth set on the waterways of the Thames, about a woman searching for her mother who disappeared years ago — was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, making Johnson, at twenty-seven, the youngest nominee in the prize’s history.
Sisters (2020) — about two sisters and the increasingly claustrophobic, possibly supernatural dynamics of their relationship — is a short, intense gothic novel.
Major Works and Themes
Johnson writes about landscape, myth, family, and the body. Her fiction is gothic in the deepest sense — concerned with boundaries (between human and animal, land and water, self and other) and with what happens when those boundaries dissolve.
Key Works
- Fen (2016)
- Everything Under (2018) — Booker shortlist
Collecting Johnson
Fen first edition (Jonathan Cape, 2016) brings $30–$50. Everything Under (Jonathan Cape, 2018) brings $20–$40. Johnson is early in her career.