Lamorna Ash

Lamorna Ash is a writer and freelance journalist based in London.

Her first book, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, won a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize.

In May 2025, her latest book, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion, will be published, exploring why young people in Britain today are turning towards faith in an age of uncertainty. Over the past few years, Lamorna has journeyed across Britain to meet those wrestling with Christianity today. She interviewed almost 60 individuals between the ages of 20-30 and spent time at various retreats across the country, from Evangelical youth festivals to Quaker meetings, a silent Jesuit retreat along the Welsh coastline to a monastic community in the Inner Hebrides, in order to investigate what drives young people in the twenty-first century to embrace Christianity.

This is also Lamorna’s own deeply personal journey with religion. Lamorna was raised with about as much Christianity as most people in Britain these days: a basic knowledge of hymns and prayers received via a Church of England primary school education; occasional brushes with religious services. But once she started writing about her two friends’ unexpected conversions, she began encountering a recurring phenomenon: in an age of disconnection and apathy, a new generation was discovering religion for itself.

Written with lyrical beauty and sensitivity, this is a reminder of our universal need for nourishment of the soul.

Lamorna is a true rising star. She is still in her twenties and already a massively gifted writer with a big future ahead. William Dalrymple has called her ‘a new star of non-fiction’. Her first book was Dark Salt Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town which won a Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and picked as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.