Polly North

The Curated Life Project™

Laboratory : Education : Journal-writing+

Polly North has a PhD in life-writing. She is Founding Director of the Great Diary Project at Bishopsgate Institute (est. 2007) and has cataloged and made publicly available over 19,000 diaries and journals by the ‘everyperson’, by non-famous and ‘ordinary’ folk. Unsurprisingly, her work shows that no-one is ‘ordinary’, each of us is extraordinary!

The Great Diary Project is now the largest European archive of diaries. (Possibly the World’s largest.)

As well as being an archivist of diaries, Polly regularly publishes on issues around life-writing and diary-writing, most recently with Routledge (2021) and Oxford University Press (2022 and 2023).

Polly has also produced exhibitions of diaries for a range of audiences. GDP exhibitions have been held at the V&A Museum of Childhood; at HBO’s launch of the Anne Lister diaries series; and at Somerset House, in association with King’s College, London. She regularly speaks on diary matters both commercially (AM Archives 2024) and at educational and cultural institutions, including New York’s International Women’s Week in conjunction with HBO (2019), the British Library (2020) and the Universities of Cambridge (2022), Amsterdam (2023) and Sussex (2021 and 2023).

pollynorth[@]hotmail.com

Polly is considered a leading expert on the last two millennia of Global diary-writing practices. Interests include: deliberate eclecticism; high-functioning fallibility; Useful Fictions; Gap Theory; pluriversal accounts of self-reflection; self-reflection as an ambiguous art and journey; understandings of conscious awareness; issues of authenticity, agency and voice in life-writing, especially on-line life-writing; analogue and digital practices of personal-reflection and personal-expression; journal-writing as a form of artful personal-reflection and development; female life-writers; life-writing and mystic women; life-writing across the World circa 800-1600 C.E.; life-writers circa 500 B.C.E.; the extraordinary in the ordinary; the hyper-reality of regularity; and empowered self-curation of personal-expression.