Lamorna Ash

Lamorna Ash is a British writer and education specialist. Her first book, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2021.

Biography
Ash attended St Paul's Girls' School before studying English literature at Oxford University, graduating in 2016. She earned an MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology from University College London. She worked as an intern at The Times Literary Supplement.

After university, Ash went to Newlyn, a fishing town in Cornwall for one month to learn about their fishing community. She stayed with a local couple, Lofty and Denise, a fishmonger and a ship's chandler. She spent a week on the trawler Filadelfia, working with a crew of local fishermen.

Her first book, Dark, Salt, Clear, written about Ash's time in Newlyn, was published by Bloomsbury in April 2020. In 2021, Ash won the Somerset Maugham Award for her memoir. The book was a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'. She is currently a freelance writer for the TLS and an English specialist for an education charity in Hackney.