New York Times Bestselling Author
Eleanor Voss writes about what it costs to pay attention — and what we gain when we finally stop performing it.
Eleanor Voss, 2024 — photo by Mara Telle
Eleanor Voss is a cultural critic and essayist whose work sits at the strange intersection of cognitive science, technology, and the examined life. For fifteen years she has written about the inner conditions that make — or unmake — creative work, public life, and private flourishing.
Her books have been translated into twenty-two languages and taught in universities from Edinburgh to Seoul. She contributes essays to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Le Monde diplomatique, and speaks at institutions that take ideas seriously — and audiences willing to be changed by them.
There is a particular kind of fatigue that arrives not from doing too much, but from watching yourself do it. It is the exhaustion of the observed self — the part of you that has learned to narrate its own experience in real time, that reaches for a screen before a feeling has finished forming, that has confused documentation with living.
I became interested in this phenomenon the winter I spent six weeks without a smartphone. Not as a wellness experiment, not as a stunt, but because my phone broke and I was too busy — and then too curious — to replace it. What I discovered was not, as I expected, a romantic return to simplicity. What I discovered was how thoroughly I had outsourced my attention to a device designed to keep it from me.
A landmark examination of how digital culture has colonised the inner life — and a practical, philosophically grounded argument for reclaiming it. Named one of the best books of 2023 by The Guardian, Time, and Kirkus Reviews.
Seventeen essays written across a decade of restless reading — on Sebald, on grief, on the essay form itself, and on what it means to be genuinely moved by a sentence in an age that has made being moved an aesthetic category.
A polemic and a love letter — to long books, to conversations that go nowhere productive, to the unscheduled afternoon. Translated into fourteen languages. Still in print in its ninth edition.
The debut that announced a distinctly searching voice — written as social media was first rewriting the terms of selfhood. Prescient, personal, and still startlingly relevant.
One of the most necessary voices writing about the mind and modern life. Voss doesn't just diagnose — she illuminates a way through.
The New York Times — Zadie Chen, Books Editor
Urgent, humane, beautifully argued. This is a book that changes what you notice — and notice that you're noticing.
The Guardian — Book of the Week, October 2023
Voss is the rare writer who is equally at home with cognitive science and literary criticism. A landmark of the form.
The Atlantic — Featured Essay, November 2023
Use the enquiry form below or email her team directly at speaking@eleanor-voss.com. Eleanor accepts select engagements at literary festivals, corporate retreats, and academic institutions. She speaks on attention, creativity, the creative life, and the culture of self-improvement. Lead time of at least three months is preferred.
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Yes, selectively. Press and media enquiries should go through her publisher's communications team, or use the contact form below and mark the subject line "Press." She asks for reasonable notice and a sense of the audience and angle.
All four books are available for educational adoption. Contact her publisher directly for institutional pricing and digital access options. Eleanor is also available (schedule permitting) for author Q&A sessions with student cohorts.
Speaking enquiries, press requests, rights and permissions — or simply a note. Eleanor's team reads everything and replies to everything that warrants one.