Eliza Clark (born 4 May 1994) is a British author, known for her novels Boy Parts (2020) and Penance (2023).
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Early life and education
Clark was born and raised in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Clark says she read keenly as a child, but was advised by her school not to go to study English at Oxbridge because she received C grades in her Maths and French GCSEs.
Clark studied art foundation, focusing on sculpture, before attending the Chelsea College of Arts, graduating in 2016. Her dissertation was on "how Michel Foucault's ideas of surveillance play out in the online era."
Career
In 2016, Clark received funding from the New Writing North's Young Writer's Talent Fund and mentoring under Matt Wesolowski. She then worked at Mslexia magazine as a marketing assistant.
Clark said she wrote her debut novel Boy Parts (2020) in "eight months of weekends off from a day job at Newcastle’s Apple store" in 2016. Published under Influx Press, it went on to become Blackwell's fiction book of 2020 and a finalist for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Despite critical recognition, the novel was a sleeper hit before gaining popularity on TikTok. It follows Irina Sturges, a psychopathic erotic photographer whose fetish work sexually exploits men she scouts on the streets of Newcastle. The novel's unreliable narrator has been compared to the protagonists of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. It was adapted into a one-woman show by Gillian Greer in 2023, running for six weeks at the Soho Theatre and starring Aimée Kelly.