Lucia is an award-winning author two books, both published to critical acclaim, and she has a third book being published in May 2024.
In Lucia’s first book, I Choose Elena, she recounts a time in her life when she was fifteen and on track to be an Olympic gymnast. She was violently raped in Sydney on a night out, sparking a series of events that left her devastatingly ill for more than ten years of her life. When, a decade later she finally broke her silence and told someone about the rape her path to healing began. Lucia eventually found solace in writers like Elena Ferrante, and her work is about rediscovering vulnerability and resilience in the face of formerly unbearable trauma. The book was published in four territories and has been translated into three languages.
Lucia’s second book, My Body Keeps Your Secrets was published in 2021. The book was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize for Literature. The book explores secrets a woman’s body keeps, from puberty to menstruation to sexual pleasure; to pregnancy or its absence; and to darker secrets of abuse, invasion or violation.
Moving from girlhood and adolescence to young womanhood, Osborne-Crowley establishes her credentials as a key feminist thinker of a new generation with this widely researched and boldly argued work about reclaiming our bodies in the age of social media, telling the story of the woman’s body in 2020 through a global, inclusive lens. The book will be translated into Dutch in 2024.
Virginia Woolf wrote the title essay “On Being Ill” originally in 1926, shortly after a world wide pandemic. In this anthology it was published again, alongside the poignant and excellent contributions by contemporary writers who have been asking themselves similar questions as Woolf did, whilst experiencing pain, sickness and suffering, but also epiphanies, creativity and foresight. Writers from across the United Kingdom, America, and Ireland have contributed each in their own individual style on the topics of illness and literature. Poet Deryn Rees-Jones wrote the preface. Other authors include Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nafsissa Thompson-Spires, Nadia de Vries, Mieke van Zonneveld, Lieke Marsman and Jameisha Prescod and Sinéad Gleeson. The anthology finishes with Audre Lorde’s introduction to her Cancer Journals. The Dutch essays were translated by Sophie Collins.
The explosive, behind-the-scenes account of the criminal trial of the century.
‘I understand – and sympathise with – the feeling you might have that you already know the Jeffrey Epstein story. But I am not here to tell you a story about Jeffrey Epstein, or even Ghislaine Maxwell. I am here to tell you the stories of ten women, many of whom have never spoken at length before, about the real impact of sexual trauma on their lives.’
In November 2021, Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of five counts of sex-trafficking of minors, and now faces 55 years in prison for the role she played in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of four girls. The trial was meticulously covered by journalist and legal reporter Lucia Osborne-Crowley, one of only four reporters allowed into the courtroom every day.
The Lasting Harm is her account of that trial, a gripping true crime drama and a blistering critique of a criminal justice system ill-equipped to deliver justice for abuse survivors, no matter the outcome.
Centring the stories of four women and their testimonies, and supplemented by extra material to which Osborne-Crowley has exclusive access, The Lasting Harm brings this incendiary trial to life, questions our age-old appetite for crime and punishment and offers a new blueprint for meaningful reparative justice.