Lamorna Ash

Thursday 16th April 2026

For our April event we had the privilege of welcoming author Lamorna Ash to the Institute, speaking about her second novel Don't Forget We're Here Forever: a New Generation's Search for Religion, hosted by the charismatic Keith Jones. 

Having read English at Oxford University, and continuing with an Anthropology Masters at University College London, she spent time in the small fishing community of Newlyn for her fieldwork research, on account of her Cornish family heritage. She regaled us with anecdotes, such as the couple she stayed with who thought she was studying spiders, and the challenge of getting onto a trawler where ‘a vomiting 22 year old, with pink hair, was welcomed…’. It was the foundation for her first book Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town and her skill at non-fiction was born. 

After her first publication, her easygoing editor blessed her with: ‘off you go, I trust you’. It started by writing an article on two men she knew from university, a comedy double act, both converting to Christianity and becoming priests. The writing challenged her to get the reader to feel what it would be like being a person of faith. Lamorna started with the most basic understanding of Christianity, let alone the questions to ask, language to use or what faith even looked like. The whole process was a learning curve, but testified that church ‘slowly, incrementally started changing my life’, proving to be the stimulus for this second book. 

Casting the net wide, ‘from radical Quakers, to pentecostal Christians’, this book builds a wider portrait of what faith is. Every Christian is as different as Christians are to atheists – there are so many forms, flavours and relationships to faith. She discovered a plurality of belief within churches, ‘really good places for holding difference’, disintegrating her very monolithic idea of Christianity and becoming ‘porous-bordered’.

Urged to capture as much of a place as possible in her writing, her research methods were quite chaotic. She was informed of places by friends of friends, not Googling them properly and not knowing what she was going to find. ‘Not a card-index’ kind of journalist, as Keith quipped! Despite some cult-esque scrapes, she would then write observations as quickly as she could. She would also interview while recording and taking notes. 

These conversations, often with individuals with contrasting beliefs, in listening to them back she could hear her failures of understanding, but also doubt in a person’s voice. She was jarred and confused, oscillating between encounters. She met celibate nuns in Norfolk, the only place that the Virgin Mary has appeared in Britain, she’d have us know, (she joked that she was told not to talk about that county, to hearty chuckles). She went to Iona, the birthplace of Christianity in Scotland, where each service made her weep. The integral metaphor of the book came from a Bible story that she felt compelled towards: Jacob and the Angel. Wrestling together, Jacob refuses to let the Angel go and demands a blessing. The Angel takes his hip bone. Lamorna said that ‘The best conversations feel like this intense wrestling’ often with a loss or major change afterwards.

Now, a new project is on the horizon. Inspired by the recent James Baldwin biography by Nicholas Boggs, which structures Baldwin’s life through his partners, this new book will follow how we narrativise our romantic love, continuing to explore the fundamental question ‘how do you survive the business of living?’ Lamorna’s goal in writing is wanting to be read, spark conversations, and bring the book to life, and that was certainly achieved this evening. 

James Phillips