Tabby Carless-Frost

Writer, Researchers, Filmmaker

Tabby Carless-Frost (they/them) is a writer, filmmaker, and researcher whose work explores haunting, creative histories, and the ethics of storytelling.

They are currently completing an AHRC-funded PhD in Creative Writing at Brunel University London, supervised by Booker Prize–winning author Bernardine Evaristo. Their research examines the formal and ethical tensions between life writing and fiction — particularly where memory, embodiment, and trauma intersect — expressed through experimental memoir and historically rooted fiction.

Their hybrid memoir project, In Pieces, is a fragmentary exploration of memory, trauma, and inherited pain, centring on the 1977 suicide of their grandmother — a deeply personal yet universally resonant work about the stories that both bind and unravel us.

Tabby’s creative work is drawn to the overlooked and the unearthed — from bog bodies and forgotten queer histories to women of science erased from the archive. Their debut novel-in-progress reimagines the life of Anna Morandi, an 18th-century Bolognese anatomist and wax modeller, exploring artistry, desire, and the body as both subject and medium.

They are also the writer-director of Out of the Peat, an ecological horror short film funded by the BFI Network in collaboration with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust. Shot on black-and-white Super 16mm, the film follows an amateur archaeologist drawn to the strange preservative power of peat-bog waters. As they excavate the land in search of a body, what surfaces are forgotten histories, uneasy truths, and a haunting reminder of the climate crisis.

Out of the Peat has screened internationally, including at the London Short Film Festival (nominated for Best British Short), Sound of Silent Film Festival (Chicago), Trans Film Festival Stockholm, OffBeat Folk Film Festival (nominated for Best Sound and Music), and Sunrise Film Festival (Lowestoft).

Tabby’s writing has appeared in Ache, SANS Press, Women’s Studies, t’ART Magazine, Crumble, Horizon Magazine, Mxogyny, and at the Museum of Sex Objects.

tabby.carless-frost@brunel.ac.uk