emma gannon
Emma Gannon is a Sunday Times bestselling and award-winning author.
She is the author of seven bestselling books: Ctrl Alt Delete, The Multi-Hyphen Method, Sabotage, Disconnected, The Success Myth, OLIVE and A Year of Nothing. Her second novel, TABLE FOR ONE, will be published by Harper Collins in April 2025. She has written for The Sunday Times, New York Magazine, Condé Nast Traveller, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, Vanity Fair & more. Emma is a judge for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
Emma’s popular newsletter The Hyphen on Substack was one of the first newsletters in the UK to create a six-figure business from paid subscriptions. The newsletter reaches almost 60k+ readers weekly and currently ranked #5 in Top Literature Substacks globally. Alongside writing, she hosts creativity retreats in the UK and all over the world.
Emma was also one of the first in the UK to recognise the power of podcasting in 2016. Her WEBBY-nominated top 10 business-charting podcast Ctrl, Alt, Delete, a non-traditional careers podcast, has had over 13 million downloads to date, with guests including Elizabeth Gilbert, Ava DuVernay and Priyanka Chopra-Jonas. She was a presenter at the British Podcast Awards in 2020 and has recorded many live episodes and even recorded a podcast from inside Buckingham Palace. The podcast published the last ever episode in January 2023 after six years.
Between 2012-2019 she wrote columns for The Sunday Times, The Telegraph and Courier magazine on the topics of work, wellbeing and creativity. Before that, she was the social media editor at Condé Nast (Glamour UK) and Bauer Media’s The Debrief magazine. In 2016, she got her first book deal and was selected by Microsoft to appear in their TV campaign showcasing her multi-hyphenate working life.
In 2018, she was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 List in Media & The Telegraph’s 35 Under 35. She has been called “one of the most influential thinkers on how we can work smarter” by Penguin Books and a “terrific interviewer” by the Financial Times. She is a trained coach and popular teacher on the online learning platform Skillshare, where her classes on creativity have attracted over 80k+ students to date.
In July 2020, her debut novel OLIVE was published and was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. It was published by Harper Collins in the UK and Andrews McMeel in the US. The audiobook is narrated by Fleabag’s BAFTA-winning actor Sian Clifford, hit no.1 in the Apple audiobook charts and was nominated for multiple awards. OLIVE was described as “profound, accessible, and highly engaging” by Marian Keyes. Also in 2020, her third non-fiction book SABOTAGE was published.
In 2023, she published The Success Myth with Penguin which received positive reviews from the likes of Alain de Botton, Martha Beck and Seth Godin. In 2024, she published A Year of Nothing with independent publisher The Pound Project — which sold thousands of copies in a few weeks on sale and was reviewed in the press widely, from the BBC, Woman’s Hour, Guardian, ELLE and Australian TV. In 2024, two personal highlights were: writing the foreword for Julia Cameron’s memoir Floor Sample and introducing Elizabeth Gilbert live on stage at The Barbican as part of her tour.
Emma is an experienced speaker/panelist and has spoken at Arvon, TEDx, SoundsTrue, The Oxford Union, Founders Forum, Instagram HQ, Amazon UK and Google — plus many literary festivals over the years: Sharjah Book Festival, Hay Festival, Henley Literary Festival, Bath Festival, Wimbledon BookFest, Jersey Festival of Words, Guernsey Literary Fest, Folkestone Book Festival, Stoke Newington Literary Festival, Greenwich Book Festival, Alnwick Story Fest, Edinburgh Wellbeing Festival and Cheltenham Literature Festival (including being a guest curator). She has also appeared regularly on BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 4 (Woman's Hour), BBC Radio 2 (Simon Mayo), BBC Radio 5 Live (Naga Munchetty), BBC Radio 1 (Life Hacks) and Virgin Radio (Chris Evans Breakfast Show.) She is also an ambassador for The Princes Trust & The World Literacy Foundation.
Book agent: Curtis Brown
Commercial agent: Diving Bell
“One of the most prominent Substack writers in the UK” — The Times
“The most popular UK novelist on Substack” — The Bookseller
“A bright light and a shining star, and in many ways the voice of a generation.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love/Big Magic
“Read her, listen to her, explore her world and the world at large through her eyes. Hers is a journey well worth taking.”
— Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
“I love Emma Gannon's wise and refreshing perspective on work and building a meaningful life.”
— Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
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