Lucy Mercer is a writer based in London. She is the author of Emblem (Prototype, 2022), which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and a book of the year in Frieze, The New Statesman and The White Review. She is co-editor, with Livia Franchini, of Too Little, Too Hard (Peninsula Press, 2026), a collection of essays by some of our most exciting writers on the relation of writing to labour and value. Her essay on wax and mortality, Afterlife, is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Lucy exhibits visual work and often explores the relation between text and image through writing, research and curation. She is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield working on ‘An Art of Looks: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Culture’, and an Associate Editor at Ocula. She is co-curating a forthcoming exhibition based on Afterlife with independent curator and writer Lou Stoppard.

She has been awarded the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, the White Review Poet’s Prize, and was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Futures Award for Literature.

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