About
Biography
Louisa Young’s family is English, Scottish, Irish, Australian and Greek. Ancestors apparently include rat-catchers, pirates, Grand Postleniks of Wallachia, Admirals, singers, the Rev Rosslyn Bruce (who took a seal around in his sidecar), Charlemagne, Robert the Bruce’s brother, Darwin’s cabin boy, Phanariot Greeks in Constantinople, Scottish merchants in St Petersburg, Count Dracula and Mary Ann Chaworth who broke Byron’s heart. One grandmother was a sculptor, widow of Captain Scott of the Antartic, and mother of Sir Peter Scott the naturalist. The other one drowned, young, in Lake Geneva. Both her grandfathers fought at Zeebrugge. Her father, as well as her brother, four sisters and five cousins, and she, all grew up in the house where JM Barrie wrote Peter Pan.
Education
She was educated in London; seven years of state and seven private, and read history at Trinity College Cambridge. She then lived in a squat in Battersea for seven years, doing the kind of picturesque jobs writers do (dinner-lady at a parking-meter factory, person inside cartoon-animal suit in a New York department store, upright bass player in a busking band — Coolschool, which won GLC London Buskers of the Year in 1984) before learning to sub-edit in a pub on the Fulham Road. Fired by the frustrations of subbing, she became a journalist.
Journalism
As a freelance journalist she wrote features and columns for the Guardian for many years, for the motorcycle press (she was contributing editor on Bike magazine) and for Marie Claire, where she was for seven years lead feature writer, mostly covering eccentric aspects of US culture, such as unlikely beauty pageants, and born-again Christian gang bikers. Her first day on Fleet Street was the last day of hot-metal printing, so she was greeted by a banging-out ceremony. She has also written for The Times, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, W, Vogue, Tatler, the Financial Times, Time Out, and many many magazines. After a period on the Daily Express, she ran away to drive across the US. In Nashville in 1989 she interviewed Johnny Cash, which turned out to be something of an epiphany.
In 1993 she swapped her Harley-Davidson for a baby, who grew up into actor, activist and Drag King Isabel Adomakoh Young.
Books
Young’s first book was A Great Task of Happiness (1994), her biography of her grandmother, the sculptor and Antarctic widow Kathleen Scott. She then wrote her Egyptian Trilogy, BabyLove, Desiring Cairo and Tree of Pearls.
Bedtime stories she and her daughter Isabel told each other were the basis of the Lionboy trilogy, which they wrote together under the pseudonym Zizou Corder, and which are published in 32 languages, for Lee Raven Boy Thief set in the sewers of a futuristic London. Their last novel, Halo (Puffin, 2010), set in ancient Greece, was shortlisted for the Booktrust Teenage Award, and nominated for a Carnegie Medal.
After Zizou grew up, Louisa returned to writing for adults, and published The Book of the Heart, a cultural history of our most mysterious vital organ, and the award-winning, bestselling series of WW1 novels which opened with My Dear I Wanted to Tell You and continued with The Heroes’ Welcome and Devotion.
In 2012 her fiancé, the composer Robert Lockhart died. Her memoir, You Left Early, A True Story of Love and Alcohol (2018), tells the story of that relationship. Her novel Twelve Months And A Day (2022), a poignant ghosty Romcom, deals with it again, but with a happy ending. Though several of the characters are dead.
Her current project is writing three volumes to continue The Cazalet Chronicles, the much-loved, much praised account of the mid twentieth century in Britain through family eyes, by Elizabeth Jane Howard. She and Howard are in fact family: Jane was Louisa’s aunt. Volume six will be published in 2026 by MacMillan.
Music
In 2018 Louisa released her first album, You Left Early, a collection of her songs about Robert, arranged and produced by Alex Mackenzie, her collaborator and MD in the band Birds of Britain. Music plays a major part in most of Louisa’s books, and her own songs appear in both You Left Early and Twelve Months And A Day.
Teaching
Louisa has taught at Arvon, Skyros, Guardian Masterclasses, Eilean Shona Arts, for Birkbeck University of London’s MA in Creative Writing, in secondary schools as Writer in Residence for the educational charity First Story, and as Visiting Specialist Lecturer in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of Kent at Canterbury. She also (sometimes) offers private individual mentoring.