Tabby Carless-Frost

Writer, Researchers, Filmmaker

Tabby Carless-Frost (they/them) is a writer, filmmaker, and researcher working at the thresholds of memory, haunting, and the ethics of telling. Their practice moves through fragments: what is left behind, what resists recovery, what insists on being felt.

They are currently completing an AHRC-funded PhD in Creative Writing at Brunel University London, supervised by Booker Prize–winning author Bernardine Evaristo. Their research interrogates the tensions of life writing – where memory falters, where the body remembers otherwise, where trauma interrupts form. Across memoir and fiction, they write into these breaks, treating the page as both incision and suture.

Their hybrid memoir, In Pieces, gathers fragments around the 1977 suicide of their grandmother. It is a work of return and refusal: an attempt to hold what cannot be made whole, to write with the dead without sealing them into narrative. Here, detail vacillates between care and cruelty; the archive opens, but does not resolve.

Their work is drawn to what lies half-buried: bog bodies, erased queer histories, women written out of science and back into myth. Their novel-in-progress reimagines the life of Anna Morandi, the eighteenth-century anatomist and wax modeller, where the body becomes both subject and medium – cut, studied, preserved, desired.

Working across film, Tabby is the writer-director of Out of the Peat (BFI Network), a black-and-white Super 16mm ecological horror tracing the strange preservative power of peatlands. As a body is sought in the bog, other histories surface – climate, memory, extraction – refusing to stay buried. The film has screened internationally and was nominated for Best British Short at the London Short Film Festival.

Their documentary work, including Fields Beneath Towers, turns towards collective life and fragile ground: Mudchute Park & Farm, held between community and development, past and possible futures. Children move through the frame; voices gather; the land remembers.

Across critical and creative work, Tabby writes with and against the archive, developing a practice of citational grafting – a method of visible seams, borrowed language, and careful assembly. Their writing has appeared in Ache, SANS Press, Women’s Studies, and elsewhere.

Their work has been supported by the BFI, AHRC, Henry Moore Foundation, and the Association for the History of Glass.

In their free time, they volunteer in the gardens at Spitalfields City Farm, tending to other forms of growth, where care is ongoing and nothing is ever fully finished.

tabby.carless-frost@brunel.ac.uk