About Naomi Foyle
Naomi Foyle was born in London and brought up in Hong Kong, Liverpool and Saskatchewan in an interracialized Quaker family. While completing a Philosophy BA at the University of Toronto, she wrote the libretto of the award-winning chamber opera Hush: An Opera in Two Bestial Acts, after which she embarked on a nine-month train voyage around Europe. This solo journey, begun during the US-led Operation Desert Storm in Iraq and completed with tattered copies of the Collected Rimbaud and Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love in her backpack, fully birthed her as a writer.
Over the decades Naomi has traveled widely in the UK, Europe, the Americas, Australia and Asia and the Arab world. She has taught English in South Korea, where her first novel Seoul Survivors is set; and read Tarot Cards from the streets of Belfast to the beaches of India, where her mother was born into a Scottish family in the Raj. In 2014 she visited Lviv to receive the Hryhorii Skovoroda Prize for her poetry and essays about Ukraine. Co-founder of British Writers in Support of Palestine, she has been to the West Bank three times, including to launch A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry, the bilingual anthology she edited for Smokestack Books in 2017. Currently based in Brighton, UK, Naomi Foyle is Reader in Critical Imaginative Writing at the University of Chichester and Poetry and Fiction Editor of Critical Muslim. In 2020 she received a late assessment of Autism Spectrum Condition, making her a member of the ‘feral generation’ – autists who grew up lacking formal knowledge or understanding of their condition.
Animated by her questing, internationalist spirit, Naomi Foyle’s writing career spans poetry, theatre, opera, science fantasy, short fiction, essays and collaborations from film poems to songs and music videos. The golden threads running through this maverick weave are Naomi’s acute empathy for the outsider; driving desire for global justice; and Blakean faith in the power of the imagination to connect us to our deeper selves, each other, the planet and the cosmos.