Rachel Hewitt

Rachel Hewitt is a British writer of creative non-fiction, and was a lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University until 2023.

Education Hewitt attended the University of Oxford, where she studied English Literature at Corpus Christi College for a BA and M.St. She completed a PhD in 2007 in English literature at Queen Mary University, London, with a thesis on romanticism and mapping titled Dreaming o'er the Map of Things: The Ordnance Survey and Literature of the British Isles, 1747-1842. In 2009, she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to the Department of English and Drama at Queen Mary.

Writing career Hewitt's first book Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey was published in 2010 by Granta, and built on her PhD thesis work. Hewitt was awarded a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction for this project.

In 2011, Hewitt was announced as one of ten BBC Radio 3 AHRC New Generation Thinkers.

Her second book A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind was published by Granta in 2017, and explores the decade of the 1790s through the biographies of five people: poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, medic Thomas Beddoes, and photographer Thomas Wedgwood. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

In April 2023, she published In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors, a book which explores the histories of women's participation in sport and the 'great outdoors', interwoven with a personal memoir about loss. Hewitt was awarded an Eccles British Library Writer's Award in 2018 for this project.

Books Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (Granta Books, 2010); A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (Granta Books, 2017); In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors (Chatto & Windus, 2023);

Awards & Fellowships Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2009 Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction in 2010 Eccles British Library Writer's Award in 2018 Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Personal life Hewitt has three daughters, and lives in Yorkshire. She was married to Pete Newbon, a lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature at Northumbria University in Newcastle, who died in January 2022. She is a keen runner and has been running since her mid-20s.