Bonny Brooks has been awarded the prestigious Arts and Humanities Research Council award for her novel, Names Have Been Changed. A fiction writer, scholar, and journalist, her work has appeared in The Independent, HuffPost and others, covering topics including North Korea, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, right-wing populism, and contemporary literature. Bonny has been published in Japanese, and highly praised by literary and journalistic heavyweights. She has been interviewed on the BBC World Service.
Bonny is Associate Editor for Arc Digital, a new commentary platform run by contributors to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times and Buzzfeed News. She was recently awarded a research fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center for Scholars at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., for her work on North Korea. Here she delivered a paper entitled ‘North Korea, Literary Ventriloquism, and the Archives: Paralleling cognitive dissonance through creative juxtaposition.’
Bonny has a novelette Good Choices out with Open Pen this autumn, that acclaimed memoirist Xanthi Barker calls ‘through and through brilliant’ (available to preorder here). Her short fiction has been shortlisted for a number of major prizes. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and she has been the recipient of an Arts Council/Literature Works award for poetry. She has been Runner Up for TLC’s Pen Factor, and was selected to present her work for TLC’s publishing conference Writing in a Digital Age. She has been a Writer in Residence at the internationally-esteemed music venue Sage Gateshead, and from Glastonbury Festival to Newcastle City Library, Bonny has read her work on diverse platforms. This year, Bonny’s work was profiled in the AHRC’s national annual Impact Report, as creative work with distinct social impact. With a keen interest in scholarly public engagement and teaching, Bonny has delivered writing workshops in Washington D.C., for secondary schools in North-East England in outreach funded by the Catherine Cookson Foundation, and taught undergraduates at both Newcastle University and the University of Birmingham.
When she’s not banging on about politics and literature, Bonny might be found watching stand-up gigs or breaking out into weird comedy voices with her loved ones.