I am a writer of fiction and nonfiction, focusing on culture, history and literature. My first novel won the Hachette New Writing North Children’s Novel Award 2025. My work has been published in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Magazine, the Spectator,the Telegraph, Apollo Magazine, History Today, and Slightly Foxed Quarterly, among other places. My first nonfiction book, The Ground Beneath Our Feet, won a Society of Authors K Blundell Award and is forthcoming from Reaktion Books.
I earned a doctorate from Oxford University, researching nostalgia and historical fiction in the nineteenth-century novel. My book based on this research, Twilight Histories, was published by Brill in 2023.
Camilla Cassidy
Writer
The Ground Beneath Our Feet
A historical and literary journey through England's embattled landscape.
What can it mean to belong to a place when it doesn’t belong to you? The Ground beneath Our Feet tells the story of how common land all but disappeared in England. It traces the legal and social process known as enclosure – one that reimagined shared land as private property and put up fences to keep people out. The journey takes us via resistance, rebellion, resignation and resurgence from Norman hunting forests to the deserted villages of the eighteenth century and forward to the stump of Sycamore Gap. Camilla Cassidy brings together the voices of lawmakers and lawbreakers, the high and mighty and the commoners, poets and artists to explore tradition, belonging and alienation in our landscape.