Aularian Authors: Jessica Hatcher-Moore
Event
Register now to hear award-winning journalist and author Jessica Hatcher-Moore (2001, Modern Languages) discuss her book After Birth. Her first book tackles the taboos that shroud postnatal health, and is described as “an enormous public health service”.
Registration
This talk will take place on zoom and joining details will be sent to you on Monday 21 June.
About Jessica
Jessica is a non-fiction writer living on a hillside in North Wales. She writes with candour and humour about a broad range of subjects – her recent stories include an alleged UFO landing in the mountains near her home, and how the UN employed a clown and children’s party entertainer to resolve conflict in Somalia and Haiti. And her first book, After Birth, focuses on the rigours of childbearing. Released on 27 May, it has been described as “an enormous public health service” and a “fearless” critique of female healthcare in the UK.
Jessica grew up in Shropshire. She studied Modern Languages at the Hall between 2001 and 2005, then moved to London to try to find a way into writing. She dabbled with sports and adventure writing first. Jessica had played international lacrosse, was one of the fastest unaffiliated runners in the 2011 London Marathon, and once cycled 5,000 miles across sub-Saharan Africa with two fellow Aularians. She eventually got her break as a reporter for the London Evening Standard’s gossip column – although she admits that she wasn’t much good at it, because she never knew who anyone was.
Soon after that, she gave up celebrities and moved to Nairobi to try her luck as a freelance journalist on the East African beat. Within five years, she’d won a number of prestigious awards for her investigative features, including a Frontline Club Award for a story about the murder of three Italian nuns in Burundi, and was a regular contributor to the Guardian and Newsweek, writing about subjects including Islamic militancy, piracy, sexual violence and human trafficking.
In 2016, pining for the British countryside, she moved with her husband to Llangollen in North Wales, a decision made in part because it had the tightest contour lines they could find within an hour’s drive of a decent airport. She is now a mother to a three-year-old and a nine-month old, having written her book whilst pregnant with the younger one.