Jane Housham

Jane Housham is a writer, artist and publisher. She gave up her PhD on Dante’s philosophy of language and escaped to a lovely job at Virgin Books, a company whose name her father was too embarrassed to say out loud. After working for a number of different publishers as well as for herself, she is currently managing a small university press.

She posts daily images on Instagram of combinations of small objects from her collection of stuff, which has been accumulating around her in a more or less uncontrolled fashion since she was a child. A heavily illustrated book is in the pipeline, inspired by her posts: Stuff I Collect will combine kitsch and colour in hopefully delightful ways.

As a writer, she tackles surprisingly dark subject matter, which must be confusing for her Instagram followers. She has published an account of a gruesome child murder in Victorian Gateshead, The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane (Quercus, 2016), and self-published Tom’s Bad Stories (2021), strange tales conjured from the skewed world of a 1940s children’s dictionary.

Her art is mainly an exploration of the past, mining old postcards and photographs for glimpses of real people caught unawares. She has had work in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and at the Higgins Bedford (in the exhibition Edward Bawden & Me).

She reviewed books for the Guardian for many years, among other publications, and misses those days of intense page-turning. She lives in Hitchin, Hertfordshire and has two grown-up children.