Tanya Shadrick
Tanya Shadrick’s memoir The Cure for Sleep is the story of a life transformed slowly after sudden near-death.
Subscribers to her newsletter on Substack receive monthly writing prompts and regular opportunities to submit their own words for publication on the book's website. She shares true stories from her own life in order to call forth stories from others.
REVIEWS
An Evening Standard Best Non-Fiction Book for 2022
A Waterstones Non-Fiction Book You Need to Read in 2022
Such a bold, brave, and beautiful story about birth, death, rebirth and building a larger life. CHARLIE GILMOUR, author of Featherhood
I love this book. Tanya's story is moving and inspiring. Her thoughts and writing are well considered, courageous & true: real art. Just reading her is pleasure. AMY LIPTROT, author of The Outrun
In beautiful prose, Tanya Shadrick writes her own fairy tale of becoming. She is fearless in her depiction of female desire – I think many women will find themselves in these pages. KATHERINE MAY, author of Wintering
A book of women and words; homes and honesty; light and longing. A life laid bare and given to us as reminder of what it means to choose to live. Shadrick weaves the raw beauty of the day to day with the magic of myth and fairy tale to offer us way through the darkest woods. KERRI NI DOCHARTAIGH, author of Thin Places
I finished this wonderful book with tears in my eyes. A book about daring to be, daring to head out, to encounter truths and to understand what place desire must have and must not have in a life. It is beautifully written, both careful and passionate, both slight and strong in its gestures like the best of art, and astonishingly, heartrendingly open. Intensity, beauty, subtlety, pain and courage – all are here. ADAM NICOLSON, author of The Making of Poetry
ABOUT TANYA
Tanya Shadrick’s memoir The Cure for Sleep is the story of a life transformed slowly after sudden near-death - one in which she became an artist after forty, and by an unusual route.
After some years working as a hospice scribe, she began in 2016 her Wild Patience Scrolls – a mile of writing composed pen on paper beside England’s oldest outdoor pool. She has since had residencies in other extraordinary locations, including a modernist treehouse near Lake Geneva, a tiny National Trust cabin by the wild west country sea, and Virginia Woolf’s garden on the Sussex Downs.
Her practice of writing outside to inspire creativity and connection has earned her Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts, and her occasional Wild Patience blog posts are also designed to encourage others in the slow and steady growing of a creative life.
As founder of The Selkie Press, she is also editor of Wild Woman Swimming – a journal of west country waters longlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize: a book Tanya created following just a single meeting with its dying author, Lynne Roper
