Naomi Alderman
Naomi Alderman was born in 1974 in London, England, and grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish household in Hendon, north London. This upbringing gave her deep familiarity with religious structure, gendered law, and the way institutions shape individual lives. She studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has worked as a video game designer, critic, and broadcaster, contributing regularly to the Guardian. Her range across fiction, games, and journalism gives her an unusual vantage on the intersection of technology, power, and narrative.
Alderman’s debut novel, Disobedience (2006), drew on her Orthodox background to tell the story of a woman returning to her north London community after her father’s death. It won the Orange Award for New Writers and was adapted into a film in 2017 starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. Her subsequent novels The Lessons (2010) and The Liars’ Gospel (2012) confirmed her range and her recurring interest in the structures of religious and institutional power.
The Power (2016), available on WritersReview, is her most ambitious and celebrated work. The novel imagines a world in which women develop the ability to produce powerful electrical jolts, and examines with forensic precision how this single change would restructure every institution on earth: religion, politics, economics, violence, and language. The novel is framed as a work of historical fiction written by a man in this matriarchal future, with illustrations and documentary material that enrich its alternate-world texture. Its central argument — that the distribution of power, not any essential nature, produces patterns of dominance and submission — is both radical and rigorously developed.
The Power won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2017. It became an international bestseller, was translated into dozens of languages, and was adapted into a major television series for Amazon Prime Video in 2023. The novel prompted extensive debate about gender, power, and the limits of speculative thought experiments, cementing Alderman’s reputation as one of the most intellectually serious and formally daring novelists in British fiction.
Alderman is also a prominent figure in the games industry, having co-created the location-based fitness game Zombies, Run! She was named by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists and by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers of her generation. Her work consistently operates at the intersection of popular culture and serious ideas, insisting the two are not opposed.
