Lucy Mercer is a poet and writer based in London. Her debut poetry collection, Emblem (Prototype, 2022), was a Poetry Book Society Choice and a book of the year in Frieze, The New Statesman and The White Review. She is currently writing Afterlife, a nonfiction essay on wax and mortality, which was awarded the 2024 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize and is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Lucy’s work often explores the relation of text to image through creative practice, research and curation. She makes poems as visual works, most recently exhibited at the group show The Hands That Shut The Sun at Hollybush Gardens. She frequently collaborates with visual artists, and since 2020, she has made art candles with Jamie Shovlin as an ongoing collaborative project, Croydon Candles, which have been featured in British Vogue. She is co-curating a forthcoming exhibition based on Afterlife with curator and writer Lou Stoppard.
More broadly, her research interests and projects are situated across ecology, visual cultures, cultural economy, critical poetics and material histories.
Lucy’s writing on art and literature has been published in Art Review, Bricks From The Kiln, Granta, INQUE, LA Review of Books, LitHub, Poetry Review, Poetry London and The White Review, among others. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Poet’s Prize.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, where she chaired the Literature X Ecology series in conversation with leading contemporary poets.
She is co-editor of Too Little / Too Hard, a collection of essays from some of the most exciting contemporary writers about literature, work, time and value, which will be published by Peninsula Press in June 2026. The collection draws on the publication project of the same name, which was awarded a Literature Matters Award by the Royal Society of Literature.