Claire Kohda Books in Order

Claire Kohda is a British writer, reviewer, musician, and illustrator whose fiction often starts with a plain but uneasy question: what happens when someone feels divided between the life they want and the history, body, or expectations they carry? She is half Japanese and has spoken about taking time to find a literary space that felt like her own.

Art was part of her everyday life growing up. Her father is an artist, and Kohda has remembered a home full of sculptures, wood dust, paint pots, and small creative experiments. She expected that she might become an artist herself, but watching the practical struggles of making a living from art gave her a clear-eyed view of that world.

Music became another major part of her life. Kohda works as a violinist and has performed with orchestras and contemporary ensembles, as well as alongside pop and electronic musicians. She has also played on film soundtracks and plays the koto, a traditional Japanese zither.

That musical background shows up in the way she thinks about writing. Kohda has compared shaping a novel to shaping music, with attention to pauses, breath, silence, and the space between moments.

Before publishing fiction, she built a career as a book critic. Her reviews have appeared in major British publications, often covering fiction and nonfiction from and about East Asia, including work in translation from Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Reviewing gave her a close view of the publishing world, but it also sharpened a personal question: what kind of stories did she want to write herself?

For years, she tried to write toward an idea of what an English or Japanese novel should be. The breakthrough came with a vampire. In Woman, Eating, published in 2022, Kohda found a character whose divided nature could hold questions about mixed heritage, hunger, loneliness, art, and belonging without turning any of them into a simple answer.

The book follows Lydia, a young vampire and aspiring artist trying to make a life for herself in London. Lydia cannot eat ordinary food, cannot easily obtain the blood she needs, and cannot quite settle into either the human or supernatural parts of her life. Kohda uses that setup to explore family pressure, shame, desire, isolation, and the strange business of becoming an adult.

She wrote the novel during the lockdown period, when live music work had stopped and isolation was part of daily life. Kohda has said that Lydia arrived quickly, and that the first draft was written in a month.

Kohda's work also reaches beyond the novel. She illustrated Tom Lathan's 2024 nonfiction book Lost Wonders, bringing her visual-art practice into print. Her interests in music, images, criticism, and fiction all feed into one another, even when the finished work takes a very different form.