Dr Sally Bayley, FRSL

Sally Bayley is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches academic writing, literature, film and creative writing for the Sarah Lawrence visiting programme at Wadham College, Oxford. From 2018 to 2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. In 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In 1990, Sally was the first child to go to university from the West Sussex Social Services Care system. She believes anyone can learn to write or think well given the right guidance.

She is a writer of fiction and non-fiction interested in the shifting relationship between genres, and has written widely on the life and artistic legacy of Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. Her publications include a study of the American home, Home on the Horizon: America’s Search for Space (Peter Lang, 2010) and a study of the diary as an art form, The Private Life of the Diary: from Pepys to Tweets (Unbound, 2016).

Her most recent work is Worm in the Bud (The New Menard Press, 2026). She has also written a series of three books which explore a child’s escape into literature as a form of retreat in the face of difficult social circumstances. The first, Girl with Dove: a Life Built by Books (William Collins, 2018), is a literary coming of age story which was Radio 4’s Book of the Week in January 2019, a Spectator Book of the Year (2018), and is now part of the A-level coursework syllabus. It has been lauded as a completely original work that invents a new genre. The second part of this sequence, No Boys Play Here (William Collins, 2022), combines forms of drawing and song with scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The final part of the trilogy, The Green Lady (William Collins, 2023) sees the child-narrator complete her journey from reader to writer with the help of folklore and the laws of nature, guided by the histories of ancestors and ancestral spirits introduced to her through her grandmother’s knowledge of the natural world.

Her podcast A READING LIFE, A WRITING LIFE is listed highly in the charts for book podcasts in the UK.

Teaching

Sally has a keen interest in the Liberal Arts tradition of education, teaching literature and writing through an interaction with music, theatre, dance, poetry, history and philosophy. She enjoys mentoring students of all ages as they try to find a critical or creative voice in their own writing and thinking.

Photo credit: Alexandra Kelly