Rachel Holmes

Rachel Holmes is the author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel (2020), Eleanor Marx: A Life, (2014) serialized on BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week in the UK, The Hottentot Venus: The life and death of Sarah Baartman (2006) and The Secret Life of Dr James Barry (2002), all published by Bloomsbury. She has edited many works, including the play Between Two Fires (Methuen Drama, 2022), and the essay collections Fifty Shades of Feminism (Virago, 2013) and I Call Myself A Feminist (Virago, 2015). Rachel contributed to This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017), and was for several years tutor and Writer in Residence at the Palestine Writing Workshop in Ramallah. As an academic, Rachel held lectureships at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Sussex. She was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, teaching on the post-apartheid higher education transition programme; UK Chair of the Iraq Literature Festival held in Erbil; and Visiting Literary Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford. Rachel is currently writing a historical fiction series about the 1821 Greek Revolution, based on the life of Admiral Laskarina Boubilina.