About Sally
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.’
Photograph by ALEXANDRA KELLY, taken at Worcester College, Oxford, August 2019, at The ReLit Foundation Summer Course
Above (linked) is an example of one of Sally’s stitched songs: a short dramatic audio narrative inspired by Shakespeare’s Ophelia.
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 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.
“We were immediately won over by the sheer verve of Sally Bayley’s writing. She joyously rips up every rule book in the school of memoir and tells her heartwrenching story in her own unique way, by slipping, as in a fairy tale, into the skins of the fictional characters that have shaped her world – Jane Eyre, Falstaff, Miss Marple, Betsey Trotwood. In this topsy-turvy universe you no longer know if you are reading non-fiction, fiction, or fantasy, or some new and previously unimaginable cocktail of all three. Beautifully, stunningly original.”
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
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
