Photo: Grace Gelder
Kat Lister
Agent: Juliet Pickering
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Biography: Kat Lister is a writer and editor based in London. Beginning her career as a music journalist at the NME, she has gone on to write widely for publications including Vice, Guardian, Marie Claire, Vogue, the Independent and The Feminist Times, where she was appointed Contributing Editor. In 2017, she joined the editorial team at The Pool, becoming a features and news editor until its demise in 2019.
Since her husband’s death in 2018, she has focused on investigating her experience of grief, writing widely circulated essays and features for The Sunday Times Magazine, Sunday Times Style and The Observer. Her first book, The Elements: A Widowhood, was published in September 2021 with Icon Books.
Her second book, FRAGILE BODIES: ON ILLNESS, PAIN AND THE ART OF MAKING, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 2027.
Follow Kat on Instagram: @katlister
Follow Kat on BlueSky: @katlister.bsky.social
FRAGILE BODIES
Art, 320 pages, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, April 2028
Art can be a response to pain, a way of making sense of the body when it turns against itself. In Fragile Bodies, Kat Lister explores the lives of seven extraordinary artists who confronted physical adversity and transformed suffering into creativity. From Henri Matisse's cut-outs, created when he was no longer able to hold a paintbrush or stand at his easel, to the fragmentary hope of Derek Jarman's garden in the years he spent living with HIV, via the ephemerality of Eva Hesse's tragically curtailed sculptural life, these stories illuminate the fragile interplay between the body's betrayals and the soul's resilience. Through biography, cultural criticism and personal reflection, Lister explores how bodies in crisis can yield unexpected beauty - and how art can offer resistance when words or medicine fall short.
Drawing on her own experience of illness and grief, as both patient and caregiver, Lister weaves her story into those of her subjects to ask: how does trauma influence the act of creation? What are the ethics of turning pain into art? And how do we understand creativity when the body becomes a battleground? Fragile Bodies is a meditation on vulnerability, resilience and the human drive to create meaning - even in life's harshest moments.
THE ELEMENTS
Memoir, 152 pages
Icon Books, Sept 2021
What does it mean to become a widow at 35?
In her mid-thirties Kat Lister lost her husband to brain cancer. After five years of being a wife and one of being a carer, in love and in and out of hospitals, she became a widow.
In the year following his death Kat seeks refuge in stories of grief and widowhood, but struggles to find a language that can make sense of her experience and the physicality of bereavement. Instead, she turns to the elements – fire, water, earth, air – on her quest to come to terms with her grief, to inhabit her body again, and to find out who she is now.
The Elements is a story of love, pain, hope and, ultimately, transformation.