Daisy Johnson Books in Order

Daisy Johnson was born in Paignton, Devon, in 1990 and grew up near Saffron Walden in Essex. She writes novels and short stories where family life, landscape, and old myths are never far apart. Water, animals, houses, and bodies all have a way of turning strange in her work.

She makes the ordinary feel slightly wrong, and that's usually when things begin.

At Lancaster University she studied English Literature and Creative Writing, then went on to the MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford. She has said she wanted to study writing more intensely, and the part-time structure suited her because she could work alongside it. While she was at Oxford, and working at Blackwell's bookshop, she started the stories that would become Fen and found a circle of writers she still values.

Fen arrived first, and it quickly showed what Johnson was interested in doing. Set in the English fens, the collection brings together folklore, desire, menace, and metamorphosis. Girls starve themselves toward other shapes. Houses fall in love. The land feels alive. The book won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and Johnson had already picked up the A. M. Heath Prize and the Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize early in her career.

Her first novel, Everything Under, followed in 2018 and brought her to a much wider audience. It centers on Gretel, a lexicographer drawn back toward her missing mother and the canals of Oxford where they once lived on a houseboat. The book reworks the Oedipus myth, but it never feels like homework. Its power comes from the pull between mother and daughter, the invented language they share, and the fear moving just beneath the water. That novel made Johnson the youngest writer ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Family bonds are at the center of almost everything she writes.

That is especially true in Sisters, published in 2020. The novel follows July and September, two sisters whose fierce closeness starts to feel dangerous when they move to an old family house after a disturbing event. Johnson takes a very familiar idea, siblings who know each other too well, and makes it raw, claustrophobic, and hard to shake. The book later became the 2024 film September Says, which helped bring this part of her work to a new audience.

With The Hotel, first published in book form in 2024, Johnson returned to short fiction and to one of her favorite spaces, the haunted building. These linked ghost stories, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, revolve around a hotel in the dark Fens, a place full of rumor, history, and doors that do not feel safe. If Fen showed how well she could write landscape, The Hotel shows how well she can turn a setting into a threat.

Readers who come to Johnson for plot usually stay for atmosphere too. Readers who come for atmosphere tend to find sharp emotional writing underneath all the weirdness. She now lives in Oxford, by the river, which feels fitting for a writer so drawn to water, hidden currents, and places that remember more than they should.