Octavia Bright

Octavia Bright is a writer, presenter and broadcaster. Her memoir, This Ragged Grace was a Waterstones Best Book of 2023: Biography. She co-hosted Literary Friction, the literary podcast and NTS Radio show, with Carrie Plitt, for over a decade, and presents programmes for BBC R4 including World Book Café and Open Book. In her work as a broadcaster she has interviewed some of most respected authors working today, including Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, Olivia Laing, Deborah Levy and Zadie Smith. She also hosts literary events for bookshops, publishers and festivals, such as Edinburgh International Book Festival and events for The Southbank Centre. Her writing has been published in many places including The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, Stylist and the Sunday Times, and she has essays in anthologies from Serpent’s Tail and Daunt Books (forthcoming). She taught for a year at Sorbonne Paris 3 and holds a PhD from UCL where she wrote about hysteria and desire in Spanish cinema.