Kassia St. Clair lives in London and is the best-selling British historian under 40. She has published articles, interviews, essays, and reviews in The Economist, Telegraph, Architectural Digest, TLS, and Wired; she had a color column in Elle Decoration for seven years. She has also given talks at places like the Dallas Museum of Art, Hay Festival, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Soho House. She is a frequent contributor to NPR's Marketplace. In 2018, she collaborated with Color Factory to create an exhibition at their New York headquarters
Her first book, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016), was a bestseller in the UK and explores the history and meaning of 75 colors, pigments, and dyes. This work was selected as Book of the Week by BBC Radio 4 and translated into twenty languages. In 2018, she published The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History, which examines the impact of fabrics and textiles on human history; the book was Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, Book of the Year in The Sunday Times, and a finalist for the Somerset Maugham Award. Her third book, The Race to the Future (2023), addresses an Edwardian car race and the cultural and technological history of the era
Her writing is characterized by historical rigor, accessibility, and wit, bringing complex and technical subjects to the general public through surprising and detailed stories. She is known for her meticulous organization system and her preference for working analogically
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