AIMEE BLACKLEDGE

I write darkly comedic historical fiction set in Early Modern Europe. My debut novel, Clouded in Clerkenwell, is set in 1641 London and follows two painters in a small studio at the edge of a country sliding toward civil war. It is the first novel in a planned five-book series.

I came to this period through doctoral research. My DPhil at the University of Oxford examined how objects, collections, and visual culture shaped identity in Early Modern England — work that took me into painters' workshops, household inventories, anatomical theatres, and the strange material lives of seventeenth-century collectors. I have taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Liverpool, and on the Williams-Exeter Programme, and have worked as a research associate, curator, and postdoctoral researcher in the history of art. My curatorial and research projects have included collaborations with the BBC and Art UK.

The novel grew out of that archival work, and out of the questions the archive could not quite answer: about the people who served the painters whose names we know, about ambition and survival in a craft caught between guild restrictions and royal patronage, about what creative lives look like when the systems supporting them begin to collapse.

I am at work on a second novel, following the later life of Hester Tradescant in South Lambeth, and on the second book in the Clouded in Clerkenwell series.

My poetry pamphlet Ghost Bones, written under the mentorship of T.S. Eliot Prize winner Joelle Taylor, was described by her as 'inventive, exploratory, and necessary'.

I occasionally take on historical fiction consultancy projects when the right one arrives.