Irish-Canadian · b. 1965
Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer born in Ottawa in 1965. She studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design before working as an illustrator and designer, then earned an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University after moving to Britain in her twenties. Her book-length essay Surrender (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019), about rewilders and ecosexuals in the American West, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the Barry Lopez Narrative Nonfiction Prize. In 2021 she received the Arts Foundation's Environmental Writing Fellowship. Her second book, Greyhound (2025), retraces a Greyhound bus trip she first made in 2006 while grieving a miscarriage and the death of her sister, comparing that journey to a repeat crossing seventeen years later. Pocock's essays and journalism have appeared in the Guardian, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and Granta, and she is a contributing editor at the Dark Mountain project. She lives in London, where she teaches prose fiction, environmental writing, and narrative nonfiction at the University of the Arts London.