Viral photographs of an enigmatic Belle Epoque horsewoman set me hunting through archives and circuses from St Petersburg to Paris to uncover the lives of women who were artistes, survivors, and scapegoats of the nineteenth century.
I started out working in erotica in London, and somehow it led to chasing wild horses in Mongolia, getting spooked in St Petersburg, living in Berlin for 15 years, moving to Sweden, and hunting for daredevil women of the 1800s.
Each newsletter is a dispatch from a single locationโit could be a city or a hotel, a valley or a cafรฉโsomewhere between Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Every issue will include reading recommendations, a unique recipe and underreported tales.
In which I think about POOR FREUD (my next book), and about writing when life is in flux
Cookstory is a show-and-tell way of looking at how people cook at home all over the world. The images are based on my own watercolour sketches collected over a lifetime of travelling with my paintbox.