Kitchen Counter Cultures: Rethinking Womens’ Culinary World

She has a PhD from Ulster University on women, memory and domestic space during the Troubles, and she co-edited Under My Thumb: Songs that Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, an anthology of women’s music writing (Repeater 2017). Her most recent publication is The Spinster Cookbook (Indigo Press, 2026). She lives in London.

Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen won the inaugural Nach Waxman prize for Food and Drink Scholarship in 2024 and was described in the Sunday Times as ‘a manifesto for reclaiming cooking as an intellectual’, and by The New York Times as ‘brave enough to hurt feelings, delicious enough for no one to care’. Her second book Meal Time, will be published by Jonathan Cape. She is also an editor at food and culture magazine Vittles.

Michèle's two cookery books are: French Cooking for One, and French Cooking for Two: Seasons of Friendship. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Letters.

She has held fellowships at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta and other places.