About

Eleanor is the author of two novels, The Tin-Kin (Duckworth, 2009) and Connective Tissue (Taproot Press, 2023). With her daughter, Oona Dooks, she is currently co-authoring Sea Legs, a memoir about interdependence, caring and the marine environment which will be published by Fig Tree in 2027. Sea Legs has won the inaugural World of Books Sustainable Story Award.

Between 2018 and 2024, Eleanor worked as the Communities Writer in Residence for Edinburgh International Book Festival, visiting local groups to help people develop storytelling and writing projects.

Eleanor’s second novel, Connective Tissue (Taproot Press, 2023) was based on ten years of research into the early life of her grandmother, Deborah Tannenbaum. Born into a working-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1916, Deborah arrived in the UK as a Holocaust refugee. In 1942, she married into the Traveller community in North East Scotland. For press features and reviews click here.

‘It has a viscerality not always found in memoirs of its kind, drawing an intimate physical connection between generations, and succeeding as a heartfelt tribute to her tenacious grandmother and to the generations of her family she never knew who died at the hands of the Nazi regime.’ The Herald.

Eleanor’s first novel, The Tin-Kin (Duckworth, 2009) was inspired by the Scottish Traveller side of her family. An early chapter of this book won the 2007 New Writing Ventures Award for Fiction, and the it went on to win the Saltire First Book of the Year Award in 2010. In early 2011, the book was featured on BBC TV’S The Culture Show as they reviewed the year’s new novelists.

Click here for The Tin-Kin reviews.

Click here for The Tin-Kin podcast.

‘It conjures landscape by strength of voice, and its take on history is as bracing and cleansing as the local weather.’ Ali Smith in The Guardian, 13 June 2009