Meet Emma - alumna of the former University of Glamorgan, notable author... and great great granddaughter of Charles Darwin!

This Darwin Day - 12 February and the anniversary of Darwin's birth in 1809 - sees Emma's latest book published.

This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin: A writer's journey through my family is part memoir, part biography, part book about creative writing and what really makes a novel, and also a brave book about failure, This Is Not A Book About Charles Darwin is a unique and compelling book with over 40 illustrations that should appeal to fans of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes and Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage.

Everybody knows about Charles Darwin, and many know about others in his family, from Erasmus Darwin and Tom Wedgwood, the first photographer, to composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and poet and radical John Cornford, the first Briton to be killed in the Spanish Civil War. 

But when Charles and Emma Darwin's great-great-granddaughter, another Emma Darwin, tried to root her new novel in that history, the conflict between her complex heritage, and her own identity as a writer, became a battle that nearly killed her. 

This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin takes the reader on a writer's journey through the Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton clan, as seen through the lens of Emma's struggle. Along the way, her wry, witty and honest memoir becomes a brave book about failure - and, above all, a book about writing and how stories are told.