About
Louisa Young was born into a big family. Ancestors apparently include rat catchers, pirates, Grand Postleniks of Wallachia, Admirals, singers, the Rev Rosslyn Bruce (who took a seal around in his sidecar), Charlemagne, Robert the Bruce’s brother, Darwin’s cabin boy, Phanariot Greeks in Constantinople, Count Dracula and Mary Ann Chaworth who broke Byron’s heart. The family is English, Scottish, Irish, a quarter Australian and one thirty-second Greek. One grandmother was a sculptor, widow of Captain Scott of the Antartic, and mother of Sir Peter Scott the naturalist. The other one drowned, young, in Lake Geneva. Both her grandfathers fought at Zeebrugge. Her father, as well as her brother, four sisters and five cousins, and she, all grew up in the house where Peter Pan was written.
She was educated in London; seven years of state and seven years of private, and read history at Trinity College, Cambridge. She then lived in a squat in Battersea for seven years, doing the kind of picturesque jobs writers are meant to do (dinner-lady at a parking-meter factory, person inside cartoon-animal suit in a New York department store, upright bass player in a busking band — Coolschool, which won GLC London Buskers of the Year in 1984) before learning to sub-edit in a pub on the Fulham Road. Fired by the frustrations of subbing, she became a journalist.
As a freelance journalist she wrote for the motorcycle magazine Bike, where she was contributing editor; the Guardian, where she wrote features and columns for many years, and Marie Claire, where she was for seven years lead feature writer, mostly covering eccentric aspects of US culture, such as unlikely beauty pageants, and born-again Christian gang bikers. Her first day on Fleet Street was the last day of hot-metal printing, so she was greeted by a banging-out ceremony, which was an omen. She has also written for The Times, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Financial Times, and many many magazines. After a period on the Daily Express, she ran away to drive across the US. In Nashville in 1989 she interviewed Johnny Cash, which turned out to be something of an epiphany.
In 1993 she swapped her Harley-Davidson for a baby, who grew up into actor, activist and Drag King Isabel Adomakoh Young.
Young’s first book was ‘A Great Task of Happiness’ (1994), her biography of her grandmother, the sculptor and Antarctic widow Kathleen Scott; she then wrote her Egyptian Trilogy, ‘BabyLove’, ‘Desiring Cairo’ and ‘Tree of Pearls’. Bedtime stories she and Isabel told each other were the basis of the Lionboy trilogy, which they wrote together under the pseudonym Zizou Corder, and which are published in 36 languages. Their last novel, ‘Halo’ (Puffin, 2010), was shortlisted for the Booktrust Teenage Award, and nominated for a Carnegie Medal. After Zizou grew up, Louisa returned to writing for adults, and published ‘The Book of the Heart’, a cultural history of our most mysterious vital organ, and the award-winning, bestselling series of novels which opened with the ‘My Dear I Wanted to Tell You’ and continued with ‘The Heroes’ Welcome’ and ‘Devotion’.
In 2012 her fiancé, the composer Robert Lockhart died. Her memoir, ‘You Left Early, A True Story of Love and Alcohol’ (2018), tells the story of that relationship.
Her most recent novel is Twelve Months And A Day (2022), a poignant ghosty Romcom, still dealing with love and death, but heading towards a happy ending. Though several of the characters are dead.
In 2018 Louisa released her first album, You Left Early: a collection of her songs about Robert, arranged and produced by Alex Mackenzie, her collaborator and MD in the band Birds of Britain. Music plays a major part in most of Louisa’s books, and her own songs appear in both You Left Early and Twelve Months And A Day.
Louisa has taught at Arvon, Skyros, Guardian Masterclasses, for Birkbeck University of London’s MA in Creative Writing, in secondary schools as Writer in Residence for the educational charity First Story, and as Visiting Specialist Lecturer in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of Kent at Canterbury.