About

I’m the author of If Wishes Were Horses, a Memoir of Equine Obsession (2012), and The Age of the Horse, which was published by Atlantic Books in the UK in October 2016 and by Grove Atlantic in the US in May 2017. Hara Shobo in Tokyo published the Japanese translation in November 2017. I began researching horse history late in 2004 after I left ER magazine, and my blog is a repository for the equestrian curios and news stories I’ve found along the way. You can contact me via the main page: www.susannaforrest.com.

I’ve written for the New York Times Opinionator blogs, Spiegel Online, the Guardian, The Atlantic, Paris Review Daily, Literary Hub, Times, Telegraph, Literary Review, Freitag, Atlas Obscura, Eve, New Woman and the New Statesman among others. I’m a member of the Equine Research Network.

In 2016 I won the Sophie Coe Prize for an essay on food history called “’Horsemeat is Certainly Delicious’: Anxiety, Xenophobia and Rationalism at a Nineteenth-Century American Hippophagic Banquet.” This essay is a chapter in the collection Equine Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity, 1700–Present, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld. It will be published by the University of Chicago Press.

I’ve also contributed a chapter on the new equestrian scene in China to Equestrian Cultures in Global and Local Arenas, edited by Miriam Adelman and Kirrilly Thompson (Springer). It’s called “The importation and disruption of the new Chinese equestrian landscape”.

Here are links to some of the work I’ve done that’s available online:

For The Atlantic’s Object Lessons blog: The Troubled History of Horsemeat in America.

For Literary Hub, How Byron Invented the Wild Horse.

For Paris Review Daily, on Selika Lazevski.

For the New York Times’ Menagerie blog: talking to horses through riding, learning to ride all over again, Tav and Sasa.

For Culturised: Just Horse Play? “Ex Anima” by Théâtre Équestre Zingaro.

For the Telegraph: the history of hippophagy, sidesaddle, Pippi Longstocking and pony books.

For Spiegel Online: the 2013 Horse Meat Scandal.

For the Guardian: the other big “C”, being a drag queen, erotica for women and wife auditions.

For the Literary Review: Hanging Up Our Spurs, a review of Ulrich Raulff’s Farewell to the Horse.

For Atlas Obscura: The Hidden History of Bathing in Soup Broth.

On Medium: Liberating Diana – how a Danish artist seeks to commemorate a wayward princess – and Paula Sykes: Pioneering Woman Groom in International Showjumping.

For Zoomorphic: Athletes or Anarchists? How the misunderstanding between humans and horses makes their domestication possible.

For the Scotsman: on Joyce Carole Oates’ Rape: A Love Story.

For the New Statesman: on Jonny Trunk’s Dirty Fan Mail: a life in rude letters.

En Français: a translation of the history of hippophagy piece in Courrier International.

For Gridskipper.com: ramblings on and around Berlin, ditto Momondo.com.

Talks and interviews: BBC Radio 4’s Horse History series, 12–16 March 2018; On horsemeat history: BBC World Service’s The Food Chain, 29 October 2017; ABC Saturday Extra, 16 September 2017; On horses, PTSD and Anxiety: BBC World Service’s The Forum, 22 August 2016. On pony books: BBC Radio 4 Pony Tales, September 2016. On women-only remount depots in World War One, The Equine Army, BBC1 West (2 June 2014) and BBC4 (29 September 2014). On sidesaddle, Countryfile, BBC1 (10 June 2012). 2012 Daily Telegraph Way with Words Literary Festival, Dartington Hall. Speaker, Galloping History Symposium at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, April 2014; Horse Tales: Writing the Equine in Children’s Literature at Homerton College, Cambridge University, UK, May 2016; Guildford Literary Festival, October 2016 and Wigtown Book Festival, UK, September 2017.

You can contact me using the form below: