Susanna Forrest on Horseback

Susanna Forrest is a freelance editor and journalist who lives in Berlin. She graduated from Cambridge with a first in Social Anthropology and Modern Languages, then worked for literary agent Vivien Green at Sheil Land Associates  before spending two weird and wonderful years as assistant editor at the Erotic Review.She began researching her book If Wishes Were Horses  in 2004 after she left the Erotic Review, and her blog, which you can read here is a repository for the equestrian curios and news stories she has found along the way. Susanna is currently working on a second book for Atlantic called The Age of the Horse. She has also also written for the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Eve, New Woman and the New Statesman, among others. 

Susanna grew up in the 1980s near Norwich, and like many a girl, she yearned for a pony. She was never to get one, but this didn't stop her becoming obsessed with all things equine.

If Wishes Were Horses, now available in paperback, is the story of that all-consuming interest, and of the author's nervewracking attempts, later in life, to ride once again. However, as Susanna Forrest's journey unfolds, it leads her to horse-obsessed princesses, recovering crack addicts, courtesans, warriors, pink-obsessed schoolgirls, national heroines and runaways across the ages. From girl-riders of the Bronze Age, to lavishly adorned equestrian Victorians and twenty-first-century children on horseback in Brixton, she explores the development of this Pony Cult from its earliest times to the present day. In doing so, she takes to the saddle once more and rediscovers her own riding legs in this frank, eclectic and captivating memoir of an ever-changing equine world. 

Read more in these extracts from Susanna's blog

On women, horses and WWI:

On Susanna's first attempt at riding sidesaddle last year

as well as others doing the same

photograph courtesy of Nicola Coffey

See more here