Rebecca Birrell is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of St Andrews and a Bye-Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. Her first book, This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early 20th Century was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize and awarded an Antonia Frazer Award for a Biography in Progress by the Society of Authors. It was chosen as a Guardian/Observer Art Book of the Year. Venus, Vanishing is her first novel.