About

Eleanor is currently co-authoring a memoir, Sea Legs: A Mother and Daughter’s Journey of Caring, Wonder and Whales (coming Spring 2027 from Penguin Fig Tree / Dutton). Writing as Eleanor Dooks, with her daughter and co-author, Oona Dooks, Sea Legs won the inaugural World of Books Sustainable Story Award for a work in progress.

Honest, insightful and life-affirming, Sea Legs challenges preconceptions about disability and celebrates the lessons we can learn from the natural world. It is a rallying cry for our connection to nature, to each other, and to our shared future together on this planet.

Eleanor is also the author of two novels, The Tin-Kin (Duckworth, 2009) and Connective Tissue (Taproot Press, 2023).

The Tin-Kin was inspired by the Scottish Traveller side of her family.

An early chapter of The Tin-Kin won the 2007 New Writing Ventures Award for Fiction, and the book won the Saltire First Book of the Year in 2010. In 2011, the book was featured on BBC TV’S The Culture Show as they reviewed the year’s new novelists.

‘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. 

Connective Tissue (Taproot Press, 2023) was based on ten years of research into the early life of Eleanor’s 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.

‘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.

For press features and reviews click here.

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