Rachel Hewitt


Rachel Hewitt is a British writer of creative non-fiction, and was a lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University until 2023.

Education

Hewitt attended the University of Oxford, where she studied English Literature at Corpus Christi College for a BA and M.St.
She completed a PhD in 2007 in English literature at Queen Mary University, London, with a thesis on romanticism and mapping titled Dreaming o'er the Map of Things: The Ordnance Survey and Literature of the British Isles, 1747-1842. In 2009, she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to the Department of English and Drama at Queen Mary.

Writing career

Hewitt's first book Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey was published in 2010 by Granta, and built on her PhD thesis work. Hewitt was awarded a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction for this project.
In 2011, Hewitt was announced as one of ten BBC Radio 3 AHRC New Generation Thinkers.
Her second book A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind was published by Granta in 2017, and explores the decade of the 1790s through the biographies of five people: poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, medic Thomas Beddoes, and photographer Thomas Wedgwood. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.
In April 2023, she published In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors, a book which explores the histories of women's participation in sport and the 'great outdoors', interwoven with a personal memoir about loss. Hewitt was awarded an Eccles British Library Writer's Award in 2018 for this project.

Books

  • Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey ;
  • A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind ;
  • In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors ;

    Awards & Fellowships

  • Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2009
  • Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction in 2010
  • Eccles British Library Writer's Award in 2018
  • Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

    Personal life

Hewitt has three daughters, and lives in Yorkshire.
She was married to Pete Newbon, a lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature at Northumbria University in Newcastle, who died in January 2022. She is a keen runner and has been running since her mid-20s.