My Religious Studies background ensures that wherever I go, whatever I watch, read, or hear, I am looking for fragments of the sacred. I am chasing that elusive feeling of significance that arises from creative practice and religious ritual, that is woven through both religion and the arts.

My first book and PhD thesis, Spiritual Sensations, explores film’s power to generate mystical experiences. In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia I identify film techniques that focalise the viewer’s attention in a meditative or hypnotic manner, producing intense sensations that are then attributed sacredness despite the absence of a religious framework.

The fiction that I create is also compulsively drawn to religious themes.

My debut novel The Way of Unity is a dark fantasy about a semi-psychic society that struggles to establish boundaries and to forge intimate connections. As might be expected, ritual and religious experience are central to the narrative. It is a four-POV novel about a grieving woman who takes her father’s holy mission too far, an escaped priest who is afraid die, and two siblings trying to find their way through the chaos.