Articles

About Me

I'm a freelance writer, based in Nottingham. I recently graduated from Bristol University with a First Class Honours in Liberal Arts (BA), and was runner up in National Geographic's Travel Writing Competition 2022.

I like to write about place, movement, and introspective reflections. My next projects attempt to more closely bring an interdisciplinary style of writing and research to shed new light onto these themes.

Articles

My travel pieces, personal essays, and award-winning submission to the National Geographic

Heroica Website •

On Openness and Nudity

This summer, I remembered what it meant to open myself to the world. I remembered with my full body, with the exaltation of bare flesh and vulnerability, and with what felt like a freedom I had forgotten. Open, like the unfolding fingers of a sleeping hand, caught in the sunlight. Like the gentle crook of an arm, soft skin inside, the nape of a neck where the hair falls away. Like the slit of an eye, glistening under lashes to watch the same leaking blue marry the sea and sky.

I had come to res
That's What She Said •

The Women of Iran

Finnuala Brett addresses the recent humanitarian and innately feminist crisis of the treatment of women and minorities under current Iranian regimes.

I am not a woman of Iran, but I am a woman. And in my womanhood, I can ride a bike in the streets of my town, or wear shorts in summer when it’s too hot and trousers would stick to my skin. I leave the country without a man; I have sexual autonomy; if I wish to prioritise my career I will not be deemed less than the woman I could be as a wife.

“J
Epigram •

Expanding Horizons: Travel And The Changing Self

The Croft Magazine // It’s not the place you travel to, but rather your openness to a journey that can leave a lasting impact on the self. Travel challenges your perceptions of the world as it is known to you, and helps affirm your sense of place in it.

Nearly three years ago, I left home by myself for the first time. After two months of vividly new experiences, I spent the eleven hour return flight wallowing over my journal, reading and re-reading every word about every day. The thought of dri
I:M •

'The Movement' and 'Fati's Choice' - The Stories of Refugees —

This year’s “Afrika Eye Film Festival” recently visited Bristol’s Cube Microplex - an independent and not-for-profit cinema, run entirely by volunteers - with the screening of two recent films focusing on the stories and lives of refugees, and the immense challenges they face. With absolute honesty and urgency, both documentaries pose an uncomfortable challenge to the world: they ‘re-humanise’ the refugee in a way that newspapers and media often fail to. Through the eyes of volunteers, asylum se
The Charles Causley Trust •

Finnuala Brett: 'Notes From Quiet Summertime: A Chronology'

My name is Finnuala Brett and I am studying Liberal Arts at Bristol University. This piece is a refined amalgamation of diary entries that I wrote over the summer just gone. Journaling has recently become transformative for me as an opportunity for deep reflection and a way to grapple with feeling and experience.

An introspective diary that is intended to be neither wise nor intelligent; it is not anything other than itself and me.

I saw a dead bird today. Bike keys dangling between fingers, m

Editorial Work

Subediting text, layout design, photography

The Croft: Issue 2, Sin (2022), pages 20-21

The Croft: Issue 3, Sonder (2022), pages 20-21

The Croft: Issue 4, Soiree (2022), pages 30-31

The Croft: Issue 8, From the Source (2023), pages 14-15