About Liz Jensen

liz-jensen-2023 Liz Jensen’s critically-acclaimed work spans black comedy, science fiction, satire, family drama, historical fantasy, psychological suspense, and most recently, memoir.

Liz was born in Oxfordshire in the UK to a Danish father and an Anglo-Moroccan mother and began her working life as a print and radio journalist in Hong Kong and Taiwan. After several years as a BBC reporter and producer, she spent four years in France as a freelance writer and translator and began her first novel, the black comedy Egg Dancing, (1995.) It was followed by two satirical novels, the time-slip fantasy Ark Baby (1998), and the dystopian The Paper Eater (2000). In War Crimes for the Home (2002), and the Hollywood-adapted The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2004) she turned her attention to psychological suspense, then returned to comedy with My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (2006). Her two ecological thrillers, The Rapture and The Uninvited were published in 2009 and 2012 before her move to Denmark in 2013, and in 2021 she wrote Our Silver City 2094, a novella commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary to accompany the future-set art exhibition, Our Silver City. In her memoir, Your Wild And Precious Life: On grief, hope and rebellion (Canongate, 2024) she shares her reflections on personal and ecological grief and finding resilience after the tragic sudden death of her son Raphael in 2020.

Liz Jensen shares her life with the Danish writer Carsten Jensen, author of the critically-acclaimed We, The Drowned, which she co-translated into English as Emma Ryder.

She is a founder member of Extinction Rebellion’s Writers Rebel, a literary movement using words and actions to highlight the climate and ecological emergency, and in 2023 she launched The Rebel Library, a resource for readers of climate and ecological literature in all genres.

She teaches creative writing in the UK and Denmark and volunteers on the grief helpline run by the Danish National Grief Centre. An academic study of her work, The Otherworlds of Liz Jensen, A Critical Reading by Helen E. Mundler is published by Camden House, New York.