How to Cook a Book: Olivia Potts

On how to win Cookery Writer of the Year Award

This week, we’re looking behind the curtains again as we celebrate the winners of The Guild of Food Writers Awards and check in with Cookery Writer of the Year, Olivia Potts on how she does it.

Early adopter fans of Cooking the Books will remember her being my very first guest on the show to tell us how she swerved career from barrister to books after the death of her mother. A Half Baked Idea, her beautiful memoir on grief and how to cook a whole new life would go on to be a the winner of the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book Award and the Guild of Food Writers’ Food Writer Award in 2020.

Here in a 20 minute interview after the Awards, she tells me how she went from blogger to columnist at The Spectator via various gigs with delicious. Magazine, Sainsbury’s Magazine, Grazia, Glamour, The Times, Guardian and The Telegraph.

“My hobby was writing about the connection between grief and cookery, really. So I wrote this blog that, at the time literally didn't make me any money at all. It didn't have a big readership, and I wasn't getting sponsored deals, or people knocking on my door. But one of the few people who read it was a food writer, and there was an editor at The Spectator who was starting a new food section, and he suggested me to her.”