Lucy Mercer is a London-based writer. She is the author of the poetry book Emblem (Prototype, 2022) which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and a book of the year in Frieze, The New Statesman and The White Review. She is currently writing Afterlife, a nonfiction essay on wax and mortality which was awarded the 2024 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize and is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Her writing on art and literature has been widely published in Art Review, Granta, INQUE, LA Review of Books, Poetry Review, Poetry London and The White Review among others.

Lucy’s work often explores the relation of text to image through creative practice, research and curation. She has exhibited work at Hollybush Gardens and frequently collaborates with visual artists. She is currently co-curating a forthcoming exhibition based on Afterlife with independent curator and writer Lou Stoppard.

More broadly her research interests and projects are situated across ecology, visual cultures, literary production, critical poetics and material histories.

She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, where she has worked with the Poetry Society, Natural England, National Trust and BookTrust to deliver creative community-based projects that focus on biodiversity.

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