Ash is from West London; her mother is Cornish. Ash attended
St Paul's Girls' School before studying English literature at
Oxford University, graduating in 2016. She earned an MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology from
University College London. She worked as an intern at
The Times Literary Supplement. She stayed with a local couple, a fishmonger and a
ship's chandler. She spent a week on the trawler
Filadelfia, working with a crew of local fishermen. Her first book,
Dark, Salt, Clear, written about Ash's time in Newlyn, was published by
Bloomsbury in April 2020. In 2021, Ash won the
Somerset Maugham Award for her memoir. The book was a
BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'. She is a freelance writer for the
TLS and an English specialist for an education charity in
Hackney. explores young people's search for meaning in an era of individualism and dwindling community spaces and why some are finding it in
Christianity. == References ==