Marina Benjamin is a writer of personal essays, family memoir, creative non-fiction and, most recently, a trilogy of books exploring midlife experience in real time.
The Middlepause and Insomnia were widely acclaimed at home and abroad, and have been translated into nine languages. A Little Give, published in 2023, completes the series. Her essays have appeared in Granta, Aeon, the TLS and the Paris Review.
She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, a regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation, and co-founded True North, a collective of writers working with PhD students and mid-career academics to find and build narrative content in academic writing.
Marina’s first book Living at the End of the World (1998) looked at the mass psychology of millenarians. Rocket Dreams (2003), an offbeat elegy to the end of the space age, is at the same time a story about coming of age in the 1970s, while Last Days in Babylon (2007) blends memoir, political commentary and travelogue to explore the story of the Jews of Iraq.
Marina is a former arts editor of the New Statesman, deputy arts editor of the Evening Standard newspaper in London, and senior editor at the digital magazine Aeon.
On her tutoring with Granta Writers’ Workshops: ‘There is great value to writing in a focused fashion while being “held” by both a tutor and peer group. Granta courses offer a well-designed blend of independent work and expert guidance. I’m delighted to be leading a cohort of memoir writers, helping them to shape and hone their work.’