JR Thorp

JR Thorp is an Australian currently residing in Cork, Ireland. She was a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford and did her PhD with Vona Groarke and John McAuliffe. She won the London Short Story Award in 2011, had creative work published in the Cambridge Literary Review, Manchester Review, antiTHESIS, Wave Composition and elsewhere, and has been shortlisted for the BBC Opening Lines prize. She was named an Observer Best Debut Novelist of 2021 for her book — Learwife — which was published by Canongate that same year. 

She is also a lyricist and librettist whose works have been commissioned by the Arts Council, the Wellcome Trust and St Paul's Cathedral, and her scores have been published by OUP and Editions Peters. She wrote the libretto for the highly acclaimed recent modern opera, Dear Marie Stopes, about the life of the birth control advocate and sex-advice writer Dr Marie Carmichael Stopes (1880-1958).