The last few years my life writing has been increasingly stuck. My essays have been going well, with great engagement and a high readership, but book projects have eluded me. After publishing my first memoir in 2018, writing about my life somehow began to feel joyless. I had worked so hard to develop an erudite voice but that voice was now holding me back. After abandoning several book ideas in a row, I finally started to think about what needed to change. I wanted to engage more deeply with...

My new essay 'Injury and inhibition', published today on Aeon.co discusses the life and legacy of Phineas Gage, who survived a brain injury in 1848 and went on to become one of the most frequently-cited neuropsychology case studies of all time.

When I started researching my recent BBC essay , one question in the back of my mind was, how am I going to draw a black hole? There aren't exactly a wealth of images of the real thing - just a handful of blurry telescope images to go by: orange doughnuts floating in darkness . But once I got onto the drawing phase of the project I realised this situation actually gave me a great deal of artistic freedom not available in my last illustrated essay (in which I felt a significant responsibility...