The Indigo Press is an independent publisher of contemporary fiction and non-fiction, based in London. Guided by a spirit of internationalism, feminism and social justice, we publish books to make readers see the world afresh, question their behaviour and beliefs, and imagine a better future.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a writer and journalist. Her news reporting and literary work has appeared in Granta, The Sunday Times, HuffPost UK, the Guardian, ABC News, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow and others. Lucia works as a court correspondent for Law360.
Lucia’s first book, I Choose Elena, was published in 2019. Her second book, My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Dispatches on Shame and Reclamation, was published in September 2021.
Lucia was awarded a 2022 Somerset Maugham Award for My Body Keeps Your Secrets.
In her first full-length book, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of the acclaimed Mood Indigo essay I Choose Elena, writes about the secrets a body keeps, from gender identity, puberty and menstruation to sexual pleasure; to pregnancy or its absence; and to darker secrets of abuse, invasion or violation.
Through the voices of women, trans and non-binary people around the world, and her own deeply moving testimony, My Body Keeps Your Secrets tells the story of the young person’s body in 2021. Osborne-Crowley establishes her credentials as a key intersectional feminist thinker of a new generation with this widely researched and boldly argued work about reclaiming our bodies from shame.
Lucia’s recommended reading…
I Choose Elena: On Trauma, Memory and Survival
Aged 15 and on track to be an Olympic gymnast, Lucia Osborne-Crowley was violently raped on a night out. The injuries she sustained that evening ended her gymnastics career, and eventually manifested in life-long chronic illnesses, which medical professionals now believe can be caused by untreated trauma.
In a brilliantly researched and deeply affecting essay, Osborne-Crowley invites the reader to her on decade-long journey to recovery: from the immediate aftermath of the assault, through years of misdiagnosis, to the solace and strength she found in writers like Elena Ferrante.
The author’s investigations reveal profound societal failures – of law, justice, education and the healthcare system. An essential contribution to the field of literature on assault and trauma, I Choose Elena argues that it is only through empathy than we can begin to address the self-perpetuating cycle of sexual violence.
This feeling of the world stopping is at the heart of illness, for me, and also at the heart of the new community we are creating. That immobility is almost indescribable, which makes the act of describing it one of the purest forms of love, I think: describing it, as hard as it is, is a way to care for those who also feel adrift.
In On becoming phosphorescentLucia opens up the world of chronic illness, stillness, weakness and insisting on the best version of our own lives.