The novelist on William Blake, crying through Greta Gerwig’s Little
Women and an insightful poem about teenage masturbation
Born in Bury, Greater Manchester, in 1978, Emma Jane Unsworth studied English literature at the University of
Liverpool and received an MA from Manchester University’s Centre for New Writing. Formerly a journalist and columnist for The Big Issue in the North, Unsworth has published a number of short stories and two novels including 2014’s Animals, which won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize and was adapted as a film in 2019. Her latest novel, Adults, is released by the Borough Press next Thursday.