Skip to content
Arnolfini - est 1961

Alice Vincent in conversation with Harriet Baker.

As the world grows ever noisier, Alice Vincent – twice Wainwright Prize-longlisted author of Why Women Grow – returns with a journey into sound that will ring true for many women

We’re told women are good at listening, but we rarely examine what they’re listening to, what their worlds sound like, or how it feels to be expected to listen in a world of noise made by men.

Like so many of us, Alice Vincent had become overwhelmed by the sensory overload punctuating our every moment. And then, a baby’s heartbeat arrived. A rapid, pulsing whoosh of white noise. An undeniable rhythm. Once again, Alice’s life became cacophonous – both with a new child, but also with the societal pressures that motherhood holds.

What followed was a personal quest to rediscover sound as something alive and vital and restorative. Beyond music, Alice’s journey takes her into new corners of listening: from the phantom crying heard by mothers across the world to the nightingale’s song and the crackle of the Aurora Borealis.

As our attention spans shrink and our sense of disconnection grows, Alice wants to find out if sound – seeking it, trying to hold on to it, making space for it in her life – can reconnect her not only to lost parts of herself but to a life more consciously lived. Hark is a book for women who feel unheard and a means of listening more deeply in a world that has grown too loud.

‘I loved this exploration of the ways that sound lands in female bodies. Alice Vincent is on song’ Katherine May, author of Wintering.

‘A beautiful book, which left me thinking deeply and intimately about my own sonically-charged life. Hark will make you feel more alert to sound, silence and everything in-between and will leave you more curious about what it means to listen and be listened to’ Amy Key, author of Arrangements in Blue.

Alice Vincent is a writer. She is the author of four books, including Why Women Grow and Rootbound: Rewilding a Life, both longlisted for the Wainwright Prize and named as ‘Books of the Year’ by the Financial TimesIndependentStylist and others. Alice is a columnist for the Guardian and New Statesman and writes for titles including VogueFinancial Times and the Sunday Times. She writes savour, a newsletter dedicated to the delicious things in life, and hosts the Why Women Grow and In Haste podcasts. She lives in South London.

Harriet Baker is the author of Rural Hours (Allen Lane, 2024). She has written for the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, the New Statesman, the TLS, Apollo and frieze. She read English at Oxford and holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. In 2018, she was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. She lives in Bristol.