Victoria Whitworth

Victoria Whitworth is a British academic and historian. Shу рaving worked as a lecturer, tour guide, artist's model, and teacher. Whitworth specializes in the early medieval cultures of Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia.

Whitworth studied English (literature and archaeology) at St Anne's College, Oxford, before doing an MA and a D.Phil. in York. She was a lecturer at the Centre for Nordic Studies on the Orkney campus of the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Victoria Whitworth has written four novels set in Anglo-Saxon England (The Bone Thief, The Traitors’ Pit, and Daughter of the Wolf, Other Gods).

Her most notable book is a memoir, Swimming with Seals, which was short-listed for the PEN Ackerley prize in 2018.

"My book, Swimming with Seals, feels in some ways more like a very long prose poem than a piece of scientific, nature, and travel writing or a memoir. The images work on many layers. What I am now capable of admitting is a lifelong tussle with depression," says Victoria Whitworth.

On September 27, 2020, the Sunday Times published a letter of support for J.K. Rowling for her stance on transgenderism, which Whitworth signed as one of 58 people.

Victoria Whitworth currently lives on a smallholding in Orkney, where she writes full-time.

Photo credit: Gordon Terris