AIMEE BLACKLEDGE

Aimee writes darkly comedic historical fiction set in Early Modern Europe. Her 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 series.

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

Clouded in Clerkenwell grew out of her archival work, and out of the questions the archive could not quite answer: about the people who served the painters whose names we don’t 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.

She is currently writing a novel about the later life of Hester Tradescant and the second book in The Stranger Painters series.

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