Is Hattie Crisell the nicest person in writing?
I ask because she certainly seems to be.
The host of the ‘In Writing’ podcast, the freelance journalist has just published her first book.
Also called ‘In Writing,’ the reductionist description of the work is that it is a compendium of words of wisdom gathered from the interviews she has conducted for the show.
And it is that. But, Crisell’s debut is actually something more than that and builds upon this sense of her as one of life’s good guys.
I can’t imagine what it takes to be a woman in the public eye, (an infinite tolerance for taking shit springs to mind) but Crisell manages to be accessible, professional, seemingly endlessly busy as well as unfailingly curious about her subjects.
Her weekly Creative Writing hour in which her Substack subscribers join her for a silent Google Meet is a fabulous idea. Simple, but a solution to the procrastination which blights many who want to write but feel they don’t have the time.
There has been a couple of independent women podcasters who have built their brands single-handedly and now extended into non-fiction recently – Caroline Crampton’s ‘A Body Made of Glass’ https://pajnewman.com/2024/04/11/strength-through-fragility/ was also superb – and Crisell is a welcome addition to the field.
I can’t remember how it was that I stumbled across her ‘In Writing’ podcast but the production values, the sky high quality of the guests but it was the professionalism, the openness to new ideas and the sense of community which sustained my interest.
That sense pervades every page of the book and it comes from the author. It is the best book I have read on writing since Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. And there is no higher compliment I can pay it.
Author Bio
HATTIE CRISELL is a freelance writer based in London. She is a contributing editor of Grazia magazine and her writing regularly appears in The Times, Telegraph, Elle, Vogue, and You among others. Since 2019 she has produced and hosted the podcast In Writing with Hattie Crisell, interviewing writers of all kinds in their studies. (Biography sourced from https://granta.com/contributor/hattie-crisell/)
PAJ Newman 