about

Dr Catriona Byers is a writer, photographer and historian.

Her first job, at the age of thirteen, involved washing hair at a men’s hair salon in Oxford. Since then she has worked, in no particular order, as a food stylist, tabloid editor, restaurant reviewer, recipe developer, translator, fried chicken and waffle chef, researcher, shoe saleswoman, personal assistant, journalist, film extra and copywriter. Some of these things she still does - get in touch to find out more.

She recently completed a PhD in History at King’s College London, where her thesis focused on the nineteenth-century morgues of Paris and New York, alongside research projects relating to the history of crime scene photography, haunted archives and the redevelopment of American pauper cemeteries. She is now a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHoSTM) at King’s College London. She was awarded the 2026 Institute of Historical Research (IHR) Iwan Morgan Lecture Prize for her North American research.

Her debut non-fiction trade book, MORGUE, will be published by Simon & Schuster (UK) and Scribner (USA) in 2027. Translation rights have so far been sold in Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Ukrainian. An essay on Paris morgue keeper Clovis Pierre, adapted from the book, won the inaugural Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives Award and was published in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in January 2026.

Originally from Fife, Scotland, she can now usually be found in Paris (mostly), London (sometimes) and New York (occasionally).