Lara Pawson was born in London, a city she left at sixteen for a hamlet in Somerset. For stretches, she has also lived in Abidjan, Accra, Bamako, Johannesburg, Luanda and an auberge in the Alpes-Maritimes. She is now back on the edge of north-east London, as close to the forest as can be. She is the author of three books.

Spent Light, a novel, was published in 2024 by the canniest publisher around, CB editions. It was a finalist for The Goldsmiths Prize 2024. It was selected as a book of the year in The Guardian, TLS, Frieze and New Statesman. It has been translated into Serbian, Dutch and Spanish. It will also be published in the US with McNally Editions in January 2027, and in Australia with Text in October 2026. The Australian, Spanish, and US editions, all include a foreword by Teju Cole.

This Is The Place To Be is a fragmentary memoir, published in 2016 with CB editions. It is based on the long looping monologue, Non Correspondence, directed by Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells and performed by Cathy Naden at the Battersea Arts Centre for the London International Festival of Theatre 2014, After A War. In 2017 it was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the PEN Ackerley Prize, and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. It has been translated into French and Spanish.

In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (IB Tauris, 2014) was Lara’s first book. It was runner-up for the Royal Africa Society Book of the Year 2015, longlisted for The Orwell Prize 2015, and shortlisted for both the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2015 and the Political Book Awards Debut Political Book of the Year 2015. It has been translated into Portuguese.

Her essays and reviews have been published in many places including The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Frieze, Art Review, Radical Philosophy, the Times Literary Supplement, Wasafiri and the FT.

She has taught on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, at the Hastings Writers Workshop, and has been a special guest at Arvon.  She has privately mentored a variety of writers working on their first books, both fiction and non-fiction. If you would like to discuss mentoring with Lara, do drop her an email.

Lara has held fellowships at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Cambridge. She has given papers and appeared on panels at universities in Portugal, the US and the UK, including her old & much-loved college, SOAS (where she studied first for a BA and then an MSc in politics from 1990 to 1994).

Between 1996 and 2007, Lara worked as a journalist, mainly for the BBC World Service. She lived and travelled widely in Angola, Ivory Coast, Mali and Ghana, and also reported from Namibia, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Niger and São Tomé & Príncipe. During this period she also wrote for many other publications, including specialist press on Africa, mainstream newspapers, magazines and the wires.

As well as making many programmes for the BBC, Lara has participated in numerous radio and television programmes in London, Lisbon, Luanda and Johannesburg, and has chaired discussions at the Southbank Festival of Literature, the London Review Bookshop, Broadway Bookshop among others.

She is represented by Lisa Baker at Aitken Alexander Associates.