Dr Tamarin Norwood

Dr Tamarin Norwood is a writer and academic with a background in fine art. Her literary memoir ‘The Song of the Whole Wide World’, interpreting the brief life of her baby son, was published in 2025 to reviews in the TLS, The Lancet and The Guardian; in the Sunday Times it was a feature piece, a mini podcast on BBC Radio, full-length podcasts in the UK and US, and was a Stylist pick of the best non-fiction for 2024. It is now part of medical and midwifery curricula in the UK and Australia, and is the subject of parallel studies exploring the role of humanities in healthcare training.

As an academic, Tamarin is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow working with national pregnancy and baby loss organisations to map the meanings and rituals bereaved families create when cultural narratives fail to serve them. This research builds on her essay ‘Something Good Enough’, which won the Lancet Wakley Essay Prize in 2021, and her 2022 HEIC-funded project developing writing-based bereavement resources, which are now distributed by multiple NHS Boards and Trusts across the UK, and were awarded the 2023 Vice-Chancellor's Award for impactful research and innovation at Loughborough University. She is a visiting fellow at the University of Bath Centre for Death and Society and a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She holds a DPhil in Fine Art from the University of Oxford where she was a Clarendon Scholar, and previously trained as an artist at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths.