Dr. Amy Jeffs is an author, artist, and medievalist whose work delves deeply into the art and culture of the Middle Ages. She completed her PhD in Art History at the University of Cambridge, where she co-convened a research project on medieval pilgrim souvenirs in collaboration with the British Museum and also worked extensively with the manuscript collection of the British Library.

Now based in Somerset, Jeffs brings her scholarship to life through a unique fusion of words and images, illustrating her own books with linocuts, wood engravings, and paper cut-outs. Her debut, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain, became a Sunday Times bestseller, was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year, and was named a Times Historical Fiction Book of the Year.

Her second book, Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain, explores ancient conceptions of wilderness through medieval tales of exile, monsters, and the natural world. This was followed by Saints: Legends of Heroes, Humans and Magic, and most recently Old Songs, a collection that reimagines fairy tales and reawakens shadowed descendants of Greek myths and biblical stories. Featuring figures such as Tam Lin, Child Wynd, and Maisery, Old Songs weaves a vivid tapestry of Britain’s landscape, history, and culture.

Across its pages, elf queens abduct poets at the foot of hills we can still climb today; rivers of blood run beneath their worlds. In a forest of Northumberland, beneath a tree whose lineage endures, a girl gently mimes the act of combing a dragon’s bald head—a creature who was once her brother. (The author will be performing these songs with her band ‘Soft Lap’ the previous night also at Medina Bookshop).