Sally Bayley is a fiction and non-fiction writer who lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford. Most days she swims in the river. Sally is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches academic writing, literature, film and creative writing for the Sarah Lawrence visiting programme at Wadham College, Oxford. From 2018-2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. In 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 1990, Sally was the first child to go to university from the West Sussex Social Services Care system. She believes anyone can learn to write or think well given the right guidance.
One reader has described her books as ‘rhapsodies’, which means ‘to stitch a song.’
Linked is an example of one of Sally’s stitched songs: a short dramatic audio narrative inspired by Shakespeare’s Ophelia.
Photograph by ALEXANDRA KELLY, taken at Worcester College, Oxford, August 2019, at The ReLit Foundation Summer Course
The Green Lady
The Green Lady is the third part of a literary coming of age story that began with Girl with Dove. Here, the child-narrator completes her journey from reader to writer with the help of folklore and the laws of nature. Alongside these forms of knowledge emerge several spirits of place, including the suffragist and folk song revivalist, Mary Neal and the painter J.M.W Turner, whose painting of Shoreham harbour becomes a primal scene for the history of a town and its people. Her sources are histories of ancestors and ancestral spirits, told to her by her grandmother’s whole knowledge of the natural world. The wind, the rain, plants, trees and flowers sow deep seeds in the child’s literary imagination, offering her ways of seeing the world through botany, meteorology and poetry.
Pictured are maps and illustrations by Anne Griffiths for ‘The Green Lady’
Signing copies of The Green Lady at The Rome Book Fair, December 2023
Podcast Series
In this "literature and life" podcast, acclaimed writer Sally Bayley lives on a narrowboat, surrounded by the sights and sounds of nature, sustained by reading and writing. In this series, she invites us into her life, showing us how books have the power to change your life.
Sally has recently been diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, and she shows us how literature and a connection to nature can console and give courage and insight even at the most difficult times. With the teaching and study of English Literature in steep decline in the UK, this is a passionate and urgently needed defence of the possibilities of literature to console, inspire and transform. Produced by BAFTA and Emmy Award winning producer Andrew Smith.
Events
On Saturday the 26th of November, Sally talked with Marina Warner (author of Inventory of a Life Mislaid) and Tomiwa Owolade at Blackwells bookshop in a thoughtful discussion titled 'Memories' Fault Lines' on the topic of memoirs.
Books
The Green Lady (William Collins, 20 July 2023)
The Green Lady is a beguiling blend of memoir and storytelling, that explores the relationship between children and their teachers, and the sustains power of literature, especially for those growing up in poverty or dealing with neglect or abuse. In search of a better plot, the protagonist seeks out her maternal ancestors, and other women who have paved a path to independence, happiness and artistic freedom in a space of one’s own.
No Boys Play Here (William Collins, January 2021)
No Boys Play Here is the second part of a coming of age story and tells of a teenage girl in search of her lost male relatives through the characters of Shakespeare’s plays. Illustrated with drawings by Arizona Smith, the story unfolds as a series of strange theatrical scenes in the mind of a young girl intent on finding answers to her broken family history.
Trailer for NO BOYS PLAY HERE, January 2021. Animation by Suzie Hanna based on the No Boys Play Here drawings by Arizona Smith. Voice is Sally Bayley’s and piano by Bobby Hanna.
Girl with Dove (William Collins, 2018)
Girl with Dove is a coming of age story about a young girl who escapes into a world of books as a form of social survival. There she adopts three literary characters: Miss Marple, Jane Eyre and David Copperfield, as they lead her through a series of real and literary adventures.
The Private Life of the Diary (William Collins, 2020 and Unbound in 2016)
The Private Life of the Diary tells the history of the diary as an art form through some of the world’s great diarists, including Samuel Pepys and Virginia Woolf. Part memoir, part narrative non-fiction, the book creates a life-cycle of the diary from the seventeenth century to the culture of public blurting on twitter.
Home on the Horizon (Peter Lang, 2010)
Home on the Horizon narrates an ideological history of the American home through the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the songs of Bob Dylan, and the paintings of Edward Hopper. Moving from the front porch to the backyard, the book draws upon a series of architectural spaces depicted in the literature, art, film and painting of America.
Recent publication
No Boys Play Here
(Italian cover)
Recently listed in the top ten books recommended by La Repubblica, Italy.
Sally performed readings at Festival Letteratura in Mantua (selling out a 500 ticket event at Piazza Castello on Sept 8th 2022, interviewed by Beatrice Masini), and Libreria Arcadia in Rovereto, Italy.
The Book Reporter is quoted as saying “No Boys Play Here is testimony that literature and its characters, as in a magical spell, manage to protect the imagination from evil, a book of healing under the wing of William Shakespeare.”
Audio Narratives
Creative Collaborations
Sally has collaborated with artists interested in an exchange of creative and critical languages. She has worked on several film projects with film maker, Suzie Hanna, and sound composer, Tom Simmons, bringing together poetry, narrative, music and movement. She has commissioned responses to Sylvia Plath’s poetry from choreographer Kate Flatt of the Royal Ballet School and an award winning play based on Sylvia Plath’s life story – I Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath - from writer and actress Elisabeth Gray.
Preparing for the Oxford Literary Festival Emily Dickinson event, February 2018. Photo by Jony Russell.
Interviews
An interview with Dr Chris Laoutaris from the University of Birmingham for the online Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance Equality Shakespeare Festival which ran as a series of online events throughout May and June 2022.
The Festival brought together theatre practitioners, film-makers, ‘applied theatre’ specialists, academics, actors, poets, life-writers, translators, and arts organisations to discuss, celebrate and explore the ways in which Shakespeare can be used to further equality, social justice, inclusivity, diversity and international collaboration
Sally talks with Waterstones for their ‘Shelfie’ series about her literary inspirations behind Girl with Dove.
Teaching and Mentoring
Sally has a keen interest in the Liberal Arts tradition of education. From 1995-1999 she taught for an aesthetic education project based around the Lincoln Centre in New York. Since then, she has taught literature and writing through an interaction with music, theatre, dance, poetry, history and philosophy. Sally enjoys mentoring students of all ages as they try to find a critical or creative voice in their own writing and thinking.
The ReLit Foundation Summer Course at Worcester College, Oxford, 2018
Mentoring and Making Something Together
Student’s Sketchbook
Narration begins with an ordered relationship between parts and voice is the animating force that propels the parts along towards some sort of plot. But plot must always be felt and have some sort of emotional logic: something you commit to as a felt experience you might then divest to your characters or to an aspect of yourself: to your speaking voice.
On this blog space, my mentee, Sabrina Durmaz, reflects on our sessions together as she works on completing a manuscript for a novel. She finds inspiration from collecting and archiving objects to create lines and shapes.
An epistolary collage by Sabrina Durmaz. Used as inspiration for constructing a neighbourhood in her writing. Materials: paper, glue.
Essays
Read Sally’s fictional essay on the theme of a childhood walk. ‘A Curvy Road is Better Than a Straight One.’ The essay was published in WHERE MY FEET FALL Ed. Duncan Minshull, (William Collins, 2022).
An essay on the aesthetic purpose of Sylvia Plath’s journals published by Cambridge University Press in 2019 as part of a set of essays on Plath’s work (Sylvia Plath in Context, edited by Tracy Brain).
An essay on ‘Styling the Self; The Real Muddle of Autobiography’ for iai News, published in June 2020.
Sally is represented by Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency:
SChalfant@wylieagency.co.uk
