Dr Brigid Lowe is a novelist and nature writer. She was born and grew up on Ynys Môn but now lives in Scotland with her children and their phones. Her debut novel, the Bloody Branch, is forthcoming with Vintage/Harvill Secker in 2026. It is an eco-feminist, botanical-gothic retelling of the fourth branch of the Mabinogion and other early Welsh myths. It is also a paean to North Wales, her first home. She has just finished a memoir, dense in nature writing and natural science, about starting a new life as a woman over forty, which is also a paean to Scotland, her new home. A essay based on an extract from that work was chosen for the first issue of Folding Rock magazine. Her current project is a retelling of the story of Rhiannon. She is working with folk musicians on a collaboration inspired by her reworking of the Mabinogion, hoping to bring music and narrative back together, as in the bardic tradition. Her agent is Philip Gwyn Jones https://greyhoundliterary.co.uk/agents/philip-gwyn-jones.
Brigid speaks and was educated in Welsh, though her parents are Irish, and she now lives in “Yr Hen Ogledd” – “The Old North”, within what was once the kingdom of the Gododdin. She is interested in lost connections between the celtic nations, and a shared cultural heritage embodied in myths, tales and song. She is particularly drawn to the new perspectives on feminism and our relationship with nature which the folk tradition embodies.
As a teenager she wrote fanzines, fiction for early internet magazines, and radio plays for BBC Wales. She studied literature, first at Bangor, where she won the John Robert Jones award for best degree across all subjects, and then at Oxford. She went on to a lectureship at Sheffield and a fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge, where she designed degrees and taught courses across the range of the history of literature and creative writing, and published a book and many essays on the art of the novel. Eventually she paused her academic career to care for her children, but after family difficulties the pause became a break and a period of anxiety and isolation. She started her creative life again in 2022, writing two books within two years. When away from her desk she forages her dinner, walks vertiginous arêtes from the Glyderau to An Teallach, and swims in ice and caves and bottomless pools.
