Emily Troscianko

I’m a coach, writer, and researcher. I have affiliations with the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Oxford. My six books so far are an eclectic bunch.

I’m co-author (with my stepfather, Adam Hart-Davis) of a historical biography about the man who built the first lighthouse on a rock in the open sea (2002), and of a book that will tell you everything you never knew you wanted to know about urine (2006).

The book based on my PhD (2014) explored the weirdnesses of what happens when you read Kafka, to try to understand better the strange phenomenon we call the “Kafkaesque”.

I coedited, with a colleague Michael Burke, a collection of essays (2017) about the field of research called cognitive literary studies (which explores what happens when minds and texts come into contact with each other), trying to promote more truly two-way engagement between the literary people and the scientists.

I co-authored (this time with my mother, Sue Blackmore) the world’s only textbook on consciousness, which tackles the greatest scientific mystery of them all: why we have experiences at all (or feel like we do). We’ve collaborated on the third edition (2018) and the fourth (2024).

And most recently (2024), I wrote a children’s story about a girl who finds a nest high up on the cliffs by the sea, where she escapes to when the world is too much for her.

My research at the moment focuses on the question of what makes reading (especially fiction-reading) more likely to be helpful or harmful in health-related ways, with a focus on eating disorders and recovery from them.

I write a blog on eating disorders for Psychology Today which brings together my own past experience of anorexia with the science of eating disorders. My next book is a book written mostly as a dialogue, based on my experience of recovery. It has been ethics-tested prior to publication by running an experiment in which readers with an active eating disorder read this book or one unrelated to eating disorders. It passed the test, so it will be out by early summer 2024.