recent press
Times Literary Supplement
“Clovis, after the first king. Born in Popincourt, son of a butcher. It is April 1837 and the brutal days and years of the revolution are a murmured memory from another life; there is a monarch on the throne once again and Paris is still old Paris, in these days…”
National Geographic
“In 1870s Paris, expensive plate glass panes meant one of two things: high-end shopping or public spectacle. At la Morgue de Paris, it meant both. Inside, the city’s unclaimed dead lay on tilted marble slabs beneath a trickle of water meant to stave off decay…”
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BBC Scotland
“Catriona Byers is a historian who moonlights as a food stylist. She is an expert on the dark histories of 19th Century morgues, but also photographs restaurant pizzas and plates of delicately arranged veg for magazines and food promotions…”
Fife Courier
“A Fife woman has come out top in a UK-wide essay writing competition. Catriona Byers, a first-time author from Falkland, has won the new £2,000 Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Award for younger writers… “
The Bookseller
“A historian’s look at a 19th-century Paris morgue in which the unidentified dead were laid out for public view has been snapped up by Simon & Schuster (S&S), followed by a flurry of multi-publisher auctions across Europe…”
BOOKBRUNCH
“Catriona Byers wins the new Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives Award for younger writers: her account of poet and city morgue official in nineteenth-century Paris Clovis Pierre’s life 'stood out for its stylistic panache, acute sense of historical context…”