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Karen McCarthy Woolf was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. She was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. Karen's radio credits include Night Shift, a reworking of Homer's Odyssey for R4 Book of the Week; Miss Birdie's Letter, a music/poetry travelogue for R3 Between the Ears; and a collaborative adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando which was a BBC Drama of the Week. She is currently working at the Promise Institute for International Human Rights Law as a Fulbright Scholar, co-presenting R4's Poetry Please, lecturing in China and collaborating with various techno music producers for events across London. Top Doll is her debut novel.
"Extraordinarily inventive, witty, moving and profound * Bernardine Evaristo * If you read one novel this year let it be Top Doll. This is innovative, exquisitely crafted storytelling at its finest. * Malika Booker * An astonishing combination of depth, compassion and beauty. A constant series of delicious surprises. * Leone Ross * By turns poetic, subversive and intensely absorbing, Top Doll is doing something unique and wildly imaginative within the form and structures of the novel. With Top Doll, Mccarthy Woolf firmly establishes herself as one of the most intellectually daring writers of our generation. * Mona Arshi * Wild, queer and unstoppably inventive . . . McCarthy Woolf possesses a rare, uncanny power in prose and lyric, staging a fantastic line-up of dolls with their personal baggage and societal wounds. This book is poignantly absurd and unsentimentally tender - a one-off. * Kit Fan, author of The Ink Cloud Reader and Diamond Hill * An immersive, playful, multi-voiced time-travelling story. What makes it an even more powerful read for me personally is that the fact that both McCarthy Woolf's father and mine arrived in England from Jamaica on the same boat. This book extends our shared journey through the history of our lineages in ways that are beautiful, surprising, painful and yes, humorous. McCarthy Woolf has written a book that is truly worthy of the term ""novel"" * Raymond Antrobus * McCarthy Woolf's tuning fork always rings true * Guardian *"
