Maddie Mortimer

Maddie Mortimer is a British novelist and visual artist born in 1994. She studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (2022, Picador) is her debut novel, following Lia, a mother dying of cancer, through a narrative whose voices include her twelve-year-old daughter, her husband, and the cancer itself — which speaks in associative, morphing prose of unusual formal audacity. The novel is as much about language and the body as it is about death and family. It won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2022 — the last year of that prize before it was put on hiatus — and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. It was praised for its formal courage and the depth of emotional intelligence beneath its experimental surface. Mortimer's visual art practice informed her approach to the novel's typography and spatial arrangement on the page.