BOOKS
My debut essay collection was published on the 17th June 2025 by Modern Odyssey Books.
A Line Drawn or Printed: Six Routes Through Madrid
by Jayne Marshall
Life journeys us, whether we want it to or not. But it’s up to us what we do with those unexpected and sometimes startling pivots.
The essays and stories in A Line Drawn or Printed trace the physical and emotional journeying of a woman who moves from the UK to Madrid in midlife, seeking reinvention, adventure and meaning.
Against the backdrop of the sensuous Spanish capital and following the soft hum of commuter trains, the book maps the city through themes of love, the body, leave-taking, cities and choosing to be other.
With poetic precision and disarming honesty, the essays explore how places and events etch themselves into our identity – and how meaning is often found not in an endpoint, but in the act of moving through.
Praise for A Line Drawn or Printed:
As soon as I read A Line Drawn or Printed, I wanted to give the book to others – to those who feel they don’t belong, to those enduring heartbreak, to the survivors of others’ tragedies – because this remarkable book sees you, it understands you. It’s also very, very funny.
An excoriatingly, triumphantly, honest new voice.
-Anna Beer, author of Eve Bites Back and Death of an Englishman
… to say too much about Marshall’s own personal circumstances is to ruin the book’s delicate, spidery construction. The deft writing and often confessional tone make it startlingly, deliciously personal yet the changes of pace and point of view, sometimes into fiction, sometimes into brief wordbites or prose images, save it from being a typical memoir.
This is a sown quilt of memories and sensations laid out for us, or perhaps over us. It’s unmistakably Madrid but I’m sure it’ll resonate with anyone who’s lived anywhere in the world that wasn’t the place they first called ‘home’.
-James Hartley, The Madrid Review
Available online from the Modern Odyssey website, at Secret Kingdoms, Parenthesis and Desperate Literature bookshops in Madrid. And at Backstory in Barcelona and Bookhaus in Bristol (UK). Or, the book can be ordered from any other bookshop anywhere in the world!
SELECTED WRITING
Prairie Schooner | ‘Casio, 1984’ (personal essay) (USA)
Motorcycle Sport and Leisure | ‘The Marshalls’ (article) (UK)
Transnational Literature | I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me by Juan Pablo Villalobos (review) (UK)
San Antonio Review | ‘Foolish Spirits’: The Multiple Otherings of Anima Fatua by Anna Lidia Vega Serova (review) (USA)
The Madrid Review | ‘The Craft of Writing’ (column) (Spain)
Aesthetica | ‘The History of Beauty and Ugliness’ (story) (UK)
Pikara Magazine | ‘Wxndering’ (in Spanish) (story) (Spain)
Pure Slush | ‘Baba Ghanoush’ (story) (Australia)
The Madrid Review | ‘The World Plus the Work’ (story) (Spain)
Writer and Editor 