Emma Darwin grew up in London, with interludes in Manhattan and Brussels, where her lifelong love of Pieter Bruegel the elder was born; her new novel, The Bruegel Boy, is published in November 2026.

The Times called her debut novel, The Mathematics of Love, “that rare thing, a book that works on every conceivable level”. It was nominated for many awards including the Commonwealth Writers Best First Book, and the Romantic Novelists’ Association Book of the Year, and has been widely translated.

Her Sunday Times bestselling second novel, A Secret Alchemy was described by the Daily Mail as “powerful and utterly convincing” and by The Times as “spellbinding”.

Her memoir This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin tells the story of how a creative disaster came from ten generations of creative thinkers in the Darwin-Wedgwood family tree: “Unsparingly honest, thoroughly researched, wise, witting and informative” said the Literary Review.

Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction is published by John Murray Learning in March 2016, as part of their Teach Yourself imprint. Emma’s short fiction has won prizes and been broadcast, and her third novel is in the works.

Emma has taught for Oxford, Goldsmiths and the Open University as well as giving workshops and tutoring and mentoring individual writers. Her PhD in Creative Writing  explored the practice of writing and reading historical fiction. Her Substack This Itch of Writing is linked to by writing teachers, editors and courses around the world.