Biography
SALLY BAYLEY has written a series of ground-breaking books which defy category and genre: all explore the relationship between biography, autobiography and fiction through myth, fable, fairytale and forms of lyrical and visual memory. Published works include her three-part coming-of -age sequence, Girl with Dove, No Boys Play Here, and The Green Lady. Sally hosts and performs the highly successful podcast A Reading Life, A Writing Life, designed to inspire creative writing, innovative reading, and artistic responses to living
In 1990, Sally was the first child to go to university from West Sussex County Council Care services. She studied at St Andrews university, and then went to America, where she taught aesthetic education in midwestern schools and universities and foundation arts courses to adults in inner city Ohio. She is interested in the Liberal Arts model of education and believes anyone can think or write to a high level with the right encouragement and practice.
Sally is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches on the Sarah Lawrence visiting programme at Wadham College, Oxford. From 2018-2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.
REVIEWS
‘Sally Bayley’s The Green Lady is a beguiling, experimental mixture of biography, fiction and family history… The prose is glancing and poetic, suffused with gentle melancholy, yet bursting with connections that anticipate, tease and delight… There is much here of art and literature as succour for the soul, and this charming, original and poignant book shines with intellectual and imaginative fire.’ – Philip Womack, The Spectator
[ https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/nostalgia-for-old-rundown-coastal-sussex/ ]
‘Nobody writes like Sally Bayley.’ – Lemn Sissay
