Laura Godfrey-Isaacs

Laura is an award-winning writer, artist, illustrator, and midwife working at the intersection of women’s health, feminism, and visual storytelling. She’s recently appeared in the media and cultural programming on multiple platforms for her genre-defying work such as on Panorama, at Jewish Book Week and on the Feminists Against Antisemitism podcast. Her career has been dedicated to exploring the lived experience and politics of women’s bodies, from her beginnings as a feminist artist in the 1990s to her current practice in midwifery and Graphic Medicine.

Trained at the Slade School of Fine Art and as a Fulbright Fellow at Pratt Institute, New York, her work has been widely exhibited and cited in key feminist art histories. This painterly sensibility now shapes her graphic narratives, where richly layered artworks merge with text to explore complex embodied stories.

Since qualifying as a midwife in 2016, she has combined healthcare and creative practice to champion women’s voices, as founder of Maternal Journal, an award-winning global movement supporting mental health through creative journaling, and co-author of The Maternal Journal Book (Pinter & Martin, 2021). “A brilliant creative guide to navigating and chronicling the momentous experience of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. An inspiration, a refuge and a solace.” Louisa Buck, writer and art critic. She also hosts the Maternal Journal Podcast (in the top 15% of podcasts globally) interviewing leading writers and graphic artists on creativity, parenting, and health. Maternal Journal won the Basil Lee Award for Innovation in Communication, 2019 awarded by The Royal Society of Medicine.

Her latest title, A Graphic Guide to Pregnancy and Birth (Icon Books, 2025) was created with illustrator and cartoonist Lilly Williams, and extends her pioneering work in visual health communication. ‘This book is truly brilliant – informative, inclusive, accessible and full of personality’ Laura Dockrill, writer, illustrator and author of ‘What Have I Done’ –  Motherhood, Mental Illness & Me’. The book is currently shortlisted for the Graphic Medicine Awards 2026 and will be presented, alongside Scar Tissue at the forthcoming Global Graphic Medicine Conference at John Hopkins University, Baltimore USA.

She was a winner of a JKP Writing Prize, ‘Stories of Resistance’ in 2022, and has contributed writing and illustrations to a diverse range of titles such as An Artist and a Mother (Demeter Press, 2023), and Mothering: A Performance (Routledge, 2023). She also works as an illustrator having created illustrations and visual identity for many organisations such as Every Doctor, The Radical Association of Midwives and Shifrah UK.

In 2025, she was awarded a coveted Arts Council England ‘Develop Your Creative Practice’ Award and is part of The Jewish Literary Foundation ‘Genesis’ Emerging Writers Fellowship to develop Scar Tissue, which will be the culmination of her interdisciplinary career: a vivid, urgent, and resonant story of how women’s bodies are scarred, stitched, and remade.